Thick to Thin- Cloud Computing

Essay by stewartwincUniversity, Master'sA+, July 2011

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Thick to Thin

Cloud computing is predicted to grow from a $582 million industry to $718 million by 2014. The growth of this market will depend on how easily the providers will access the technologies that enable cloud computing. Companies that need to expand data storage or hosting capabilities are now turning to the inexpensive and fast cloud architecture that allows the business to choose the services they need without expanding hardware or local facilities. Software as a service will be the growing technology that will dominate for years in information management.

Large companies that need strong network capabilities and data storage have been mostly reliant on business applications. Business network applications have always been very expensive due to the hardware and service needed to keep the business network running. Large data centers are needed requiring office space, power, cooling, bandwidth, networks, servers and storage (1). Teams of experts are need to run each area in the business application along with complicated software that produces difficulty in upgrades, maintenance, staging, testing, and production.

Cloud computing allows the managing of the hardware by a third party that is shared with multiple customers and takes the burden of managing the systems on the third party, while the customers pay for the service of the hardware, much like other utilities are ran. Instead of building a power station you pay for the amount of power you use (1).

Cloud computing is basically made up in three layers (Infrastructure, Platform, and Application) and companies can pick and choose which layer or service they need. The infrastructure layer is more commonly known as "cloud hosting". When websites grow in popularity or incoming traffic larger more powerful servers and data processing is required to handle the influx of the incoming traffic, basically the equipment can no...