Amazon Web Services provided for by Amazon was an original idea that was aimed at providing IT services on the web. This was boosted by the fact that high initial installation and maintenance costs required to set up a competent IT department was a challenge to many companies. Ericson, an international company that provides mobile services are one of the companies that has embraced cloud computing. It attributes its interest in technology to its cost-effectiveness, application of updated software, remote access services and the on-demand aspect of cloud computing.
Being an integrated public cloud, AWS allows for access to its services despite the concerned organization not being party to it. This favors Ericsson to a greater extent, since its many employees and customers based at different geographical locations can access and utilize the cloud. This saves the company much capital that could be spent in purchasing more hardware, and probably the expensive servers to accommodate its many users.
Cloud computing has three major parts; the SaaS that is software as a service that constitutes network-enabled applications such as Google applications that provides a variety of services to users via a web browser mainly handles the storage concerns, PaaS (platform-as-a-service) controls and maintains the servers for the users saving them much ado on the operating system maintenance and lastly IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) a good example being Amazon’s e-books store provides a one point easily accessible storage space.( Reese, G. 2009)
Telecommuting for the company’s employees is possible by the cloud computing remote access infrastructure. Utilization of Software as a Service by Ericsson gives it an advantage in outsourcing for off-site applications; this saves the company much, including the need to get human resources to manage these applications. Expenses incurred in updating software are also saved, since this responsibility is wholly vested upon the cloud provider; in this case AWS.
Cloud computing applies on-demand servicing where a service is paid for as used, the payments made are favorable because they are at par with the utilization level. The on-demand nature of cloud computing also makes it more reliable; this is opposed to other technologies. This is so because clients have an assurance of fair play in the deal as payments match services that they are provided for, avoiding overpayment yet under utilization of an infrastructure as it had been occurring before. (Marks, E. A., & Lozano, B. 2010)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a function of cloud computing that allows for adjustments to the required size. Its main purpose is to ease the task of scaling, according the customers’ needs, reducing the strain involved in doing this for the cloud providers. Amazon EC2’s elastic IP addresses give the user full control over the network, eliminating much time-consuming protocol in the desire to solve a problem. It also reduces the on-demand expenses incurred by allowing for automatic up and down scaling suiting the user needs.
Amazon EC2 works, in conjunction with Amazon S3, to make the storage services reliable. This is true since a combination of these technologies allows for diversity in storage and reliability of the data centers. It enhances security and extends its cost-effectiveness nature to the storage issue, by allowing for scaling, hence, full utilization of the resource available.
Rightscale helps in managing and shaping the cloud into company specific requirements. This is so, since it allows for deletion of the VPC that may not be needed. It also allows the user to create VPCs that they need but are not provided for, also enhancing scalability, management over the cloud and reducing overdependence on the cloud providers.
Cloud computing is still a puzzle to many people and is still unknown to many as it’s in its early stages of development. As expected of a new service or product in the market, it has not yet been embraced by many organizations due to lack of confidence in it and maybe a lack of proof of its success and credibility. (Reese, G. 2009)
The basic requirements for making cloud computing a success include availability of an internet connection that is strong enough to handle the services to be delivered, some hardware and software infrastructure to be shared, the on-demand service, some metered use and a feedback and security means. This can be said to be integration of virtualization, automatic server software installation and online interconnectivity. This then works towards a common-resource-pooling goal to ensure a simultaneous access to one resource by users at different geographical locations who may be unknown to each other (Sosinsky, B. A. 2011).
Cloud computing allows for an easier expansion of the computer components or network to meet future needs. Much consideration is not on the ability of the company to purchase additional infrastructure but rather its ability to market itself well and gain trust within its users.
The software and hardware used in cloud computing is updated automatically without being paid for directly by the customer. This move works to enhance user confidence over the services provided by a cloud vendor and is also cost-effective to them.
Cloud computing allows for access to the information instantly despite the geographical location from anywhere as long as one has an internet connection. This helps eliminate the need to travel to the office to work and also reduces costs of messenger employment. However, this may compromise on so many issues, including almost all employees failing to physically appear in the offices. Customers who may require physical attention may then be disadvantaged , and the benefits that come with employees sharing ideas are eliminated.
The fact that cloud computing faces the ancient data security and protection issues question its reliability as a technology with an upper hand over others. In case of data loss, cloud computing allows for a relatively faster and cheaper data recovery mechanism by employing the use of the virtual machines. This creates a disaster relief environment for the member companies (Cattedu, D. 2010). Quality services are assured to the users since cloud computing services are provided mostly by well known and competent IT vendors, for example, Google and Amazon who are also seeking customer confidence to expand their reach.
Latency concerns have also been posed as a major disadvantage of cloud computing. Latency is the amount of delays experienced when a process is taking place. With cloud computing, the processing of data for instance stored in the external clouds will experience many delays. This is mainly because the proximity of the data being processed to the application processing it greatly influences the time lapse before the output is received.
Cloud computing has to some extent been considered a reliable technology, courtesy of the benefits that have been drawn from this growing technology. Though no yet a perfect technology that can be full trusted its users have given it credit on the cost-benefit effectiveness and partnership issues as compared to the traditional means where company independence and sole operations was the way. Other impending factors kept constant, at least it can be said that the cloud providers have at their own capacity been available in providing the service.
Issues of planned and unplanned for downtime also subject this technology to a still wanting position. Amazon’s EC2 and the recent failure of blogger among others have been said to be the enormous downtime failures that have faced cloud computing. This then calls for high monitoring standards by the cloud computing clientele if they are to appropriately react to the unplanned downtime problems. Customers can also avoid issues of downtime by ensuring availability of large disk spaces. (Tauten, T. L. 2010)
As briefly noted in the above discussion, cloud computing is facing some security challenges. Apart from working to the advantage of both the service providers and receivers, the issues of virtualization to achieve economy have been of great impact to the security threats facing this technology. The original design of the hardware and software infrastructure didn’t cater for virtualization hence forcing them into this poses a great opportunity of attack of the too closely packed resources. The forced CPU compartmentalization and Disk partitions has also greatly exposed the data stored in a cloud to unauthorized access since this was never the original plan for the use of this hardware, hence little or more worse nothing may be done to save this situation.
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Tuten, T. L. (2010). Enterprise 2.0: how technology, ecommerce, and Web 2.0 are transforming business virtually. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger.
Cattedu, D. (2010), ‘Cloud Computing: Benefits, Risks, and Recommendations for
Information Security’, Communication in Computer and Information Science,
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Marks, E. A., & Lozano, B. (2010). Executive's guide to cloud computing. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley.
