Cloud as a Service to Customer
The cloud computing that are
evolving as a service in the cloud are being provided by big enterprises with a
heavy investment with resource and technology which are accessed by others via
the internet. The resources are accessed in this manner as a service – often on
a subscription basis. The users of the services being offered often have very
little knowledge of the technology being used. The users also have no control
over the infrastructure that supports the technology they are using. There are
six different forms that have been consolidated so far to understand how the
services are being provided to the customers:
1. SaaS:
This types of cloud computing
delivers a single application through the browser to thousands of customers
using a multitenant architecture. On the customer side, it means no upfront
investment in servers or software licensing; on the provider side, with just
one app to maintain, costs are low compared to conventional hosting. SaaS is
also common for HR apps and has even worked its way up the food chain to ERP,
with players such as Workday. And some who could have predicted the sudden rise
of SaaS desktop applications, such as Google Apps and Zoho Office.
2. Utility computing
The idea
is not new, but
this form of
cloud computing is getting
new life from Amazon.com, Sun,
IBM, and others who now offer storage and virtual servers that IT can access on
demand. Early enterprise adopters mainly use utility computing for
supplemental, non-mission-critical needs, but one day, they may replace parts
of the datacenter. Other providers offer solutions that help IT create virtual
datacenters from commodity servers, such as 3Tera's AppLogic and Cohesive Flexible
Technologies Elastic Server on Demand. Liquid Computing's LiquidQ offers
similar capabilities, enabling IT to stitch together memory, I/O, storage, and
computational capacity as a virtualized resource pool available over the
network.
3. Web services in the cloud closely related to SaaS
Web service providers offer
APIs that enable developers to exploit functionality over the Internet, rather
than delivering full-blown applications. They range from providers offering
discrete business services -- such as Strike Iron and Xignite -- to the full
range of APIs offered by Google Maps, ADP payroll processing, the U.S. Postal
Service, Bloomberg, and even conventional credit card processing services.
4. Platform as a service ‘Another SaaS variation’
This type of cloud computing
deliver development environments as a service. You build your
own applications that
run on the
provider's infrastructure and
are delivered to your users via the Internet from the provider's
servers. Like Legos, these services are constrained by the vendor's design and
capabilities, so you don't get complete freedom, but you do get predictability
and pre-integration. Prime examples
include Coghead and the new Google App Engine. For extremely lightweight
development, cloud-based abound, such as Yahoo Pipes or Dapper.net.
5. MSP (managed service providers)
One of the oldest forms of
cloud computing, a managed service is basically an application exposed to IT
rather than to end-users, such as a virus scanning service for e-mail or an
application monitoring service (which Mercury, among others, provides). Managed
security services delivered by SecureWorks, IBM, and Verizon fall into this
category, as do such cloud-based anti-spam services as Postini, recently
acquired by Google. Other offerings include desktop management services, such
as those offered by CenterBeam or Everdream.
6. Service commerce platforms
A hybrid of SaaS and MSP, this
cloud computing service offers a service hub that users interact with. They're
most common in trading environments, such as expense management systems that
allow users to order travel or secretarial services from a common platform that
then coordinates the service delivery and pricing within the specifications set
by the user. Think of it as an automated service bureau. Well- known examples
include Rearden Commerce and Ariba.