Cloud Computing Strategies

A Cloud Computing Strategy is actually deployed to distribute the usage of software resources, especially in an organization, to enhance its working efficiency through a variety of reasons. Two of them are:

• A centralized software system is easy to install and maintain in an organization as there are a number of devices present.
• It effectively decreases the demand for hardware and software required by the employees.

In a system deploying Cloud computing there is a considerable amount of “work-load shift” on the local machines as all the computational tasks for the heavy enterprise applications like word processing documents or a complex data analysis program is handled by the network computers in the form of a Cloud. Now, all those heavy programs don’t need to exist on a local machine anymore, rather what a local machine needs is to run this interface software to communicate with the cloud server.

Cloud computing is like accessing the e-mails from web-based e-mail service like gmail, hotmail, etc. on your computer. A number of companies are offering cloud platforms with their own Unique Selling points (USP), like:

Google cloud & Amazon Web Service are the two web-based Cloud Platforms where:

• Amazon Web Service (AWS) plug-in for eclipse allows developers to manage the instances remotely, uploading the code and executing it remotely moreover debugging the code remotely,
• Google allows it’s users to access the Cloud from various peripherals like tablets, PC’s, Laptops even from Mobile phones, as long as they have an internet connection.

In contrast with these web-based Clouds, iCloud service of Apple Inc. for their devices, is basically an application based Cloud Platform, which is more efficient in dealing with data than the above mentioned clouds with an added advantage that Apple allows it’s users to access the Google cloud, where Android users lack in this advantage and are not able to access the iCloud, even if they want to.

Some other cloud strategies are of

• Microsoft’s Hyper-V cloud, built using server 2008 and Microsoft Azure, the little inter-operability between them is what it lacks.
• Red Hat’s cloud strategy is built around JBoss middleware for promoting this interoperability and portability with the goal to offer various programming languages, frameworks over the cloud.
• Eucalyptus provides an open source product of its cloud with the commercial version, Enterprise 2.0, availing the features not present in the open source version.

In a nutshell, the main aspect of each of the service provider is to provide a “private cloud” assuring the security feature of all of the cloud computing strategies.