Nowadays we hear a lot about ‘cloud’ or cloud computing. So what is a cloud or cloud computing? In simple words It refers to use of remote computer resources hosted on remote computers over internet, rather than our own computer. So if you are storing, managing or processing any data stored on remote computer is cloud computing.
You can access, manage or process these data from almost anywhere over internet. We can find lots of examples in our daily life.
What is cloud Computing? examples, advantages and disadvantages of it.
Examples
1. Email Services
The web email like gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail etc we use to send and receive mails and messages is cloud computing. The mails and messages are stored on remote mail servers which you can access from almost everywhere.
2. Document hosting
Many of us use Google docs to store, edit, share our documents or spreadsheets is also cloud computing. There being hosted on google’s server is accessible from anywhere.
3. Photo hosting
Services like Flikr, Picasa, instagram etc provide facility to store our photos is another example of cloud computing.
4. Video hosting
We all have used youtube to watch our favorite videos. Youtube is also a cloud computing service where we can upload videos, create and edit videos and share them.
These are basic uses of cloud computing we do mostly. Apart from this there is lot more. Some business houses implements their software as service which can be accessed over internet without installing them on our computer. We need to subscribe to their plans to use the resources. Some of these companies are Citrix, Cisco Webex, Salesforce, ConnectWise.
Advantages
1. Reliability
It is more reliable than our in-house computing or infrastructure. There are available 24 hours-365 days.
2. Cost effective
It is highly cost effective as we don’t require any additional software or hardware to manage our data and resources. We need not have buy additional disk to store our data. A business house can save lot using cloud computing.
3. Disaster recovery
We invest lot on disaster recovery. But using the cloud we don’t have to worry about it. So another handsome saving.
4. Software updates
The cloud computer service providers take care of all software and hardware updates. We don’t have to worry or waste time thinking about it.
5. Flexibility/Ease of work
We can have access to cloud computing from almost everywhere, we only require an internet to access the resources. It provides a lot of flexibility to work from anywhere.
6. Security
Our data stored on cloud are highly secured. Also in case anything happened to your computer machine, your data is still safe and can be accessed.
Disadvantages
1. Downtime
The cloud is available 99% as guaranteed but still there is 1% or more of downtime when your data is inaccessible. This downtime can be due to lots of reason.
2. Security
As we see the data stored on the cloud is highly secured but they cannot guarantee against any kind of risk. Also when we host our important data we are providing access to the service providers too.
3. Limited control
Another drawback is that we have limited control. The service providers doesn’t provide full control to us. We have limited customization options.