Where is cloud computing used

The potential uses of cloud computing are only beginning to be grasped. Visions are being built on as the vast possibilities of cloud computing are realized. On both individual and corporate level, cloud computing is likely to change the way we use operate. For businesses, the cloud has the potential to transform operations, as well as cut costs.

Offices running computer networks would no longer have to deal with software installation for each computer, as well as licenses. This alleviates a tremendous IT load. Uses of the cloud include data storage, offering remote access to any work related data. The role of cloud computing on a corporate level can be either for the in house operations, or as a deployment tool for software or services the company develops for the public.

Through the PaaS, much of the administration, maintenance and deployment of the software becomes the job of a third party, the PaaS. For instance, all hosted email providers including Gmail and Outlook are SaaS cloud computing services. Why should your business consider using cloud computing over traditional brick-and-mortar hosting solutions? This article discusses how cloud computing can save time and money while improving your computing experience.

Is your company considering moving some of your infrastructure to the cloud? According to Gartner Inc. But why are so many companies making the shift from traditional in-house computing? Below we explore 10 benefits of cloud computing….

Read More. What is Cloud Computing? Examples of Cloud Computing Cloud computing is the use of hardware or software off-site that is accessed over networks for computing needs. It's hard to get figures on how companies are adopting cloud services although the market is clearly growing rapidly.

However, it may be that figures on adoption of cloud depend on who you talk to inside an organisation. Not all cloud spending will be driven centrally by the CIO: cloud services are relatively easy to sign up for, so business managers can start using them, and pay out of their own budget, without needing to inform the IT department. This can enable businesses to move faster but also can create security risks if the use of apps is not managed.

Adoption will also vary by application: cloud-based email -- is much easier to adopt than a new finance system for example. Research by Spiceworks suggests that companies are planning to invest in cloud-based communications and collaboration tools and back-up and disaster recovery, but are less likely to be investing in supply chain management.

Certainly many companies remain concerned about the security of cloud services, although breaches of security are rare. How secure you consider cloud computing to be will largely depend on how secure your existing systems are. In-house systems managed by a team with many other things to worry about are likely to be more leaky than systems monitored by a cloud provider's engineers dedicated to protecting that infrastructure.

However, concerns do remain about security, especially for companies moving their data between many cloud services, which has leading to growth in cloud security tools , which monitor data moving to and from the cloud and between cloud platforms. These tools can identify fraudulent use of data in the cloud, unauthorised downloads, and malware. The country of origin of cloud services is also worrying some organisations see Is geography irrelevant when it comes to cloud computing?

Public cloud is the classic cloud computing model, where users can access a large pool of computing power over the internet whether that is IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS. One of the significant benefits here is the ability to rapidly scale a service. The cloud computing suppliers have vast amounts of computing power, which they share out between a large number of customers -- the 'multi-tenant' architecture.

Their huge scale means they have enough spare capacity that they can easily cope if any particular customer needs more resources, which is why it is often used for less-sensitive applications that demand a varying amount of resources. Private cloud allows organizations to benefit from the some of the advantages of public cloud -- but without the concerns about relinquishing control over data and services, because it is tucked away behind the corporate firewall.

Companies can control exactly where their data is being held and can build the infrastructure in a way they want -- largely for IaaS or PaaS projects -- to give developers access to a pool of computing power that scales on-demand without putting security at risk.

However, that additional security comes at a cost, as few companies will have the scale of AWS, Microsoft or Google, which means they will not be able to create the same economies of scale. Still, for companies that require additional security, private cloud may be a useful stepping stone, helping them to understand cloud services or rebuild internal applications for the cloud, before shifting them into the public cloud.

Cloud computing is insatiably gobbling up more of the backend services that power businesses. But, some companies have apps with privacy, security, and regulatory demands that preclude the cloud.

Here's how to find the right mix of public cloud and private cloud. Hybrid cloud is perhaps where everyone is in reality: a bit of this, a bit of that. Some data in the public cloud, some projects in private cloud, multiple vendors and different levels of cloud usage.

According to research by TechRepublic, the main reasons for choosing hybrid cloud include disaster recovery planning and the desire to avoid hardware costs when expanding their existing data center. For start-ups who plan to run all their systems in the cloud getting started is pretty simple. But the majority of companies it is not so simple: with existing applications and data they need to work out which systems are best left running as they, and which to start moving them to cloud infrastructure.

This is a potentially risky and expensive move, and migrating to the cloud could cost companies more if they underestimate the scale of such projects.

A survey of businesses that were early cloud adopters found that the need to rewrite applications to optimise them for the cloud was one of the biggest costs, especially if the apps were complex or customised. A third of those surveyed said cited high fees for passing data between systems as a challenge in moving their mission-critical applications.

The report by Forrester also found that the skills required for migration are both difficult and expensive to find -- and that even when organisations could find the right people they risked them being stolen away by cloud computing vendors with deep pockets.

One third of those surveyed said their software database license costs drastically increased if they moved applications. Beyond this the majority also remained worried about the performance of critical apps and one in three cited this as a reason for not moving some critical applications.

Actually it turns out that is where the cloud really does matter; indeed geopolitics is forcing significant changes on cloud computing user and vendors. Firstly, there is the issue of latency: if the application is coming from a data center on the other side of the planet, or on the other side of a congested network, then you may find it sluggish compared to a local connection.

That's the latency problem. Secondly, there is the issue of data sovereignty. Many companies -- particularly in Europe -- have to worry about where their data is being processed and stored. European companies are worried that, for example, if their customer data is being stored in data centers in the US or owned by US companies it could be accessed by US law enforcement.

As a result the big cloud vendors have been building out a regional data center network so that organizations can keep their data in their own region. In Germany, Microsoft has gone one step further, offering its Azure cloud services from two data centers , which have been set up to make it much harder for US authorities -- and others -- to demand access to the customer data stored there. The customer data in the data centers is under the control of an independent German company which acts as a "data trustee", and Microsoft cannot access data at the sites without the permission of customers or the data trustee.

Expect to see cloud vendors opening more data centers around the world to cater to customers with requirements to keep data in specific locations. And regulation of cloud computing varies widely elsewhere across the world: for example AWS recently sold a chunk of its cloud infrastructure in China to its local partner because of China's strict tech regulations.

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.