This Brief Introduction to Cloud Computing White Paper is intended to give a broad overview of what is cloud computing and how it can benefit the organizations in managing their IT. It also highlights the key features that the IT service providers can offer to their customers. The term ‘Cloud’ represents ‘Internet’. The cloud symbol is used in the telecom world to distinguish between the responsibilities of the provider to that of the user.
Cloud computing is a paradigm shift from the client server model. Cloud computing allows users in an organization to access shared resources, applications, servers, computers, etc over the internet on demand from a service provider. The provider can calculate the time bound resource utilization as per the service level agreement and bill the organization based on the usage. This is just like using the electricity from your provider and paying the electric bill based on the usage as captured by the meter. This will help the companies to optimize their utilization of IT assets thereby cutting down on any unnecessary IT costs. So this way organization can leverage on the cloud computing model to reduce the capital expenditure on IT.
Cloud computing technology is indeed a paradigm shift in IT infrastructure management thus providing significant cost savings and increased productivity to organizations. For IT service providers, it is an excellent opportunity to provide cost effective IT solutions to their customers with improved quality of service. However, it is imperative that more and more IT skills should be trained to maintain and support the cloud infrastructure.
There are certain factors that companies need to consider such as privacy of customers, compliance (PCI, SOX, etc) issues especially if it is a public cloud with a multi-tenant architecture.
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