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TopOverview Of Cloud Computing
Most of today’s computer users are impacted by cloud computing in some form, and it is becoming an increasingly attractive approach for organizations that seek to transition from in-house data centers to remote, third-party managed data centers (Brodkin, 2009). While the usage of cloud computing is increasing, the concept of cloud computing triggers different perceptions in different people, largely since the nature of cloud computing is not based on a single technology. Instead, it is a combination of many existing technologies, including thin clients, virtualization, online storage, and service oriented architecture (SOA) (Amrhein & Quint, 2009). Similar to the apologue described in John Godfrey Sax’s poem, The Blind Men and the Elephant, (Saxe), people have different views on the composition and significance of cloud computing yet fail to capture the big picture. For many end-users and managers, the idea of cloud computing is nothing newer than exchanging information and documents through web-based, e-mail services, such as Hotmail or Gmail, and others recognize the concept as an extension of the timesharing model developed in the 1960s (Schneier, 2009). However, from IT professionals’ perspectives, these elder computing models hardly resemble the contemporary cloud computing age, as new inventions of virtualization, online collaboration, connectivity, and processor power combine to create our current era of computation. Recognizing the array of technological components comprising cloud computing, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) offers the following definition: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable and reliable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal consumer management effort or service provider interaction” (Mell & Grance, 2009).