Abstract
With rapid growth and development in technology, cloud computing has become a dominant platform for small businesses as well as major enterprises. Cloud computing streamlines the overall delivery of services and resources, helps keeping the costs in control, and global business is set for a huge change in the way businesses are done. The substantial transformation over the past few years has evolved tourism industry towards Tourism 3.0, where the consumers can easily connect to travel websites and interact by sharing their experiences. This considerably influences the perceptions, expectations and decisions both the actual as well as and potential travelers. This provides sufficient reasons for the tourism industry players to adopt and adept themselves with the latest advancements in the information technology, and the adoption of cloud computing is key in this regard as it provides easy access to a web platform that offers more productive, efficient, and competitive services to promote tourism as a vehicle of sustainable development.
TopCloud Computing
“Cloud computing is a model for enabling, 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. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.” Also, “Gartner defines cloud computing (hereafter referred to as “cloud”) as a style of computing where massively scalable IT-related functions and information are provided as a service across the Internet, potentially to multiple external customers, where the consumers of the services need only care about what the service does for them, not how it is implemented.
Cloud is not an architecture, a platform, a tool, an Infrastructure, a Web site or a vendor. It is a style of computing. Much architecture can be used to support its implementation and use. For example, it is possible to use cloud in private enterprises to build private clouds, but there is only one public cloud based on the Internet (Bento & Bento, 2011). Senyo, Effah and Addae (2016) and Senyo, Addae and Boateng (2018) define cloud computing as “the delivery of IT Infrastructure and applications as a service demand to individuals and organisations via Internet platforms”. Subsequently highlighting that it is more than information service from the view put forward by Gartner (date insert). The differences among those who have put forward definitions stem from the fact that it is hard to integrate the large number of features and characterising it from one single perspective (Elazhary, 2019). Elazhary (2019) puts forward that Cloud Computing must be considered in having a number of subset of features a shared view of that Buya, Yeo, Venugopal, Broberg and Brandic (2009) consider of a provision of virtualised computers and linked within the paradigm of the Internet.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Tourism: Is the phenomenon of movement of people from place of origin to some other destination for leisure, enjoyment, relaxation purpose, involves temporary stay and spend money there which has been earned at the place of origin and come back to original destination.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Is the delivery of computer hardware which might include servers, networking equipment, storage media, and data center space, as a service.
Web 3.0: Is the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.
Web 2.0: It is the second stage of development of the Internet, characterized especially by the change from static web pages to dynamic or user-generated content and the growth of social media.
Cloud Computing: A model for enabling, 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.
Virtualization: Virtualization adds on to the hardware flexibility and makes software deployments and redeployments easier and more efficient, without actually being connected to a specific physical server.