Cloud Computing: Is the Risk Worth the Reward?

Grazed from PlanetLotus. Author: Marta Farensbach.

These days, marketers and media alike are focusing their attention on the “cloud” creating a lot of interest and buzz. But what exactly is the “cloud”? This term is sometimes used as a metaphor for the Internet as a whole. In business, it really refers to the software platforms and infrastructure delivered as services via the Internet. In some ways, almost every organization is operating in the cloud already. Websites, social media, email, online meetings and video calls are all examples of cloud computing.

Typically, end-users access cloud applications via a browser or mobile device, while key information and back-end software are stored and processed on remote servers controlled by a third party. To be more formal, we can use the definition from the EU Agency for Information Security (ENISA) which defines cloud computing as “an on-demand service model for IT provision, often based on virtualization and distributed computing technologies.”…

They further break down the types of services. SaaS has the most visible offerings which run the gamut from free applications targeted to consumers (think Hotmail, YouTube, Flickr, etc.) to vast systems targeting businesses of all sizes (Office 365, Salesforce, WebEx) and those who target both (Google Docs, Skype). But platform as a service or PaaS (Amazon Web Services, Azure, IBM SmartCloud) and hardware as a service or HaaS (Dropbox, OneDrive, Rackspace) form the backbone for countless transparent transactions…

Read more from the source @ http://planetlotus.org/profiles/sherpa-software_124686_cloud-computing–is-the-risk-worth-the-reward-

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