Cloud Computing and E-Governance: Advances, Opportunities and Challenges

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction (Sasikala, 2011b).

Delivery Models (Sasikala, 2011c)

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  Software as a Service (SaaS): The consumer uses an application, but does not control the operating system, hardware or network infrastructure on which it's running.

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  Platform as a Service (PaaS): The consumer uses a hosting environment for their applications. The consumer controls the applications that run in the environment (and possibly has some control over the hosting environment), but does not control the operating system, hardware or network infrastructure on which they are running. The platform is typically an application framework.

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  Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): The consumer uses “fundamental computing resources” such as processing power, storage, networking components or middleware. The consumer can control the operating system, storage, deployed applications and possibly networking components such as firewalls and load balancers, but not the cloud infrastructure beneath them.