Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing, few years ago, it's only a concept, however, by now, it's already every IT partitioners' topic or "must- know" knowledge and has been implemented a while. So, what does Cloud Computing do  ? Cloud computing, in a broad view, provide services to end users through the internet per a subscription basis. It provides the services in the fly that including Softwares, Infrastructure and also Services Platform. Following are the 3 common services catalog of Cloud Computing:

(1) Software as a Services (SaaS)This type of cloud computing service delivers a single application through the browser to thousands of customers using a multitenant architecture. To customer, it means no upfront investment in servers or software licensing; At provider, only has to manage a single application that the costs are low compared to conventional hosting. Salesforce.com is the best-known example among enterprise applications, but SaaS is also common for HR applications.

(2)  Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS)
The idea is to offer storage and virtual servers that customers can access on demand. Early enterprise adopters mainly use this computing services for  non-mission-critical needs, but it is foreseeing that, the services may eventually replace parts of the datacenter services

(3) Platform as a service (PaaS)As a variation of SaaS, this form of cloud computing delivers development environments as a service. You build your own applications that run on the provider's infrastructure and are delivered to your users via the Internet from the provider's servers. Like Legos, these services are constrained by the vendor's design and capabilities, so you don't get complete freedom, but you do get predictability and pre-integration.

What is the next - the collaboration of Clouds
As the popularity of the Cloud services increase, we would seeing more and more companies or even organisations will setup their Clouds. So, another topic is how to collaborate these Clouds services to enhance the services catalog. As a sample, if there is a scenario which an Insurance company has setup its services cloud (let's first not discuss about the security/privacy issue here) that is with external interface to services its potential customer per the insurance policy application, On the other hand, if we have also setup a Cloud Services for our Medical System that with an interface to provide patient record for authorised access. By then, so long as we have setup the bridging interface between these 2 Clouds, that those insurance application if the patient medical records is required for the insurance application, could be transferred through the interaction of the Clouds which would save the a lot of operation cost and also the time for the application. And the corresponding security control can be based on PKI.