Actually what is cloud computing

To understand the workings of a cloud system, it is easier to divide it into two sections: the front end and the back end. They are connected to each other through a network, usually the Internet. The front end is the side of the computer user or client. Also the application essential to access the cloud system. It is not necessary that all cloud computing systems have the same user interface.

On the back end of the cloud technology system, there are various computers, servers and data storage systems that make up the cloud. A cloud computing system could potentially include any computer program, from data processing to video games. Generally, each application will have its own dedicated server. Large companies often require hundreds of digital storage devices.

Cloud computing systems need at least twice the number of storage devices to keep client information stored. This method of making copies of data as a backup is called redundancy.

Backups Cloud computing is an important answer to the issue of data-loss and recovery on physical hard drives. More Stories. It makes scaling easier, deployments faster and computing costs lower. Continue Reading. Your Checklist for Switching to Kubernetes. What AWS? What Is Edge Computing? The world of "multi-access edge computing" and 11 companies harnessing its power.

Data depositories: These 12 cloud storage companies can handle quintillions of bytes that's a lot. Bestriding the clouds: 12 hybrid cloud companies ushering in a new era of data management. Moonshot factory spinoff Chronicle joins Google Cloud. Tencent Cloud joins Cloudflare's Bandwidth Alliance. Illinois lawmakers propose incentives to court data center business. Rite Aid teams up with Adobe Experience Cloud for personalized customer journeys.

Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud collaborate for the "best-of-both-clouds". Cloud computing girds governments against natural disaster threats, expert says.

Amazon Web Services looks to the stars. England's Football Association kicks off new Google Cloud partnership. SurveyMonkey now has a European data center. Information innovation: 14 companies harnessing the combined power of big data and cloud computing.

Microsoft Azure allows clients to keep some data at their own sites. Meanwhile, Alibaba Cloud is a subsidiary of the Alibaba Group. Amazon Web Services. Company Profiles. Tech Stocks. Career Advice.

Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for Investopedia. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification. I Accept Show Purposes.

Your Money. Personal Finance. Your Practice. Popular Courses. Table of Contents Expand. What Is Cloud Computing? Understanding Cloud Computing. Types of Cloud Services. Deployment Models. Types of Cloud Computing. Advantages of Cloud Computing.

Disadvantages of the Cloud. The World of Business. Key Takeaways Cloud computing is the delivery of different services through the Internet, including data storage, servers, databases, networking, and software. Cloud-based storage makes it possible to save files to a remote database and retrieve them on demand.

Services can be both public and private—public services are provided online for a fee while private services are hosted on a network to specific clients. Cloud security is another issue; the UK government's cyber security agency has warned that government agencies need to consider the country of origin when it comes to adding cloud services into their supply chains.

While it was warning about antivirus software in particular, the issue is the same for other types of services too. Consultants Accenture have warned that ' digital fragmentation ' is the result as different countries enact legislation to protect privacy and improve cyber security.

While the aims of the laws is laudable, the impact is to raise costs for businesses. Three quarters of the CIOs and CTOs surveyed expect to exit a geographic market, delay their market-entry plans or abandon market-entry plans in the next three years as a result of increased barriers to globalization.

AWS: The complete business guide to Amazon's cloud services. Cloud computing services are operated from giant datacenters around the world. AWS divides this up by 'regions' and 'availability zones'. An AZ is composed of one or more datacenters that are far enough apart that in theory a single disaster won't take both offline, but close enough together for business continuity applications that require rapid failover.

Google uses a similar model , dividing its cloud computing resources into regions which are then subdivided into zones, which include one or more datacenters from which customers can run their services.

It currently has 15 regions made up of 44 zones: Google recommends customers deploy applications across multiple zones and regions to help protect against unexpected failures.

Microsoft Azure divides its resources slightly differently. It offers regions which it describes as is a "set of datacentres deployed within a latency-defined perimeter and connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network". It also offers 'geographies' typically containing two or more regions, that can be used by customers with specific data-residency and compliance needs "to keep their data and apps close".

It also offers availability zones made up of one or more data centres equipped with independent power, cooling and networking. Those data centers are also sucking up a huge amount of power: for example Microsoft recently struck a deal with GE to buy all of the output from its new megawatt wind farm in Ireland for the next 15 years in order to power its cloud data centers. When it comes to IaaS and PaaS there are really only a few giant cloud providers.

While the following pack might be growing fast, their combined revenues are still less than those of AWS, according to data from the Synergy Research Group. These big players will dominate the delivery of cloud services: Gartner said two thirds of the spending on cloud computing services will go through the top 10 public cloud providers through to It's also worth noting that while all these companies are selling cloud services, they have different strengths and priorities.

Microsoft in contrast has a particular emphasis on SaaS thanks to Office and its other software largely aimed at end user productivity, but is also trying to rapidly grow its IaaS and Paas offering through Azure. IBM and Oracle's cloud businesses are also made up of a combination of Saas and more infrastructure based offerings.

There are vast numbers of companies who have are offering applications through the cloud using a SaaS model. Salesforce is probably the best known of these. The cloud giants have different strengths. While AWS and Microsoft's commercial cloud businesses are about the same size, Microsoft includes Office in its figures.

The challenger in any competitive market has greater incentive to produce sharper and more customer-focused products and services.

Increasingly the major cloud computing vendors are attempting to differentiate according to the services that they offer, especially if they can't compete with AWS and Microsoft in terms of scale.

Google for example is promoting its expertise around artificial intelligence; Alibaba wants to attract customers who are interested in learning from its retail know-how. In a world where most companies will use at least one cloud provider and usually many more, IBM wants to position itself as the company that can manage all these multiple clouds. Meanwhile AWS is pitching itself as the platform for builders , which is its new take on developers.

The cost of some cloud computing services -- particularly virtual machines -- has been falling steadily thanks to continued competition between these big players. There is some evidence that the price cuts may spread to other services like storage and databases, as cloud vendors want to win the big workloads that are moving out of enterprise datacenters and into the cloud.

That's likely to be good news for customers and prices could still fall further, as there remains a hefty margin in even the most commodity areas of cloud infrastructure services, like provision of virtual machines. Cloud computing is still at a relatively early stage of adoption, despite its long history. Many companies are still considering which apps to move and when. However, usage is only likely to climb as organisations get more comfortable with the idea of their data being somewhere other than a server in the basement.

Those are the easy ones where the economics are hard for CIOs to argue with. For the rest of the enterprise computing portfolio the economics of moving to the cloud may be less clear cut.

As a result cloud computing vendors are increasingly pushing cloud computing as an agent of digital transformation instead of focusing simply on cost. Moving to the cloud can help companies rethink business processes and accelerate business change, goes the argument, by helping to break down data and organisational silos.

Some companies that need to boost momentum around their digital transformation programmes may find this argument appealing; others may find enthusiasm for the cloud waning as the costs of making the switch add up. There are plenty of examples of organisations deciding to go down the cloud computing route: here are a few examples of recent announcements. The Art of the Hybrid Cloud. Cloud computing is gobbling up more of the services that power businesses.

But, some have privacy, security, and regulatory demands that preclude the public cloud.