What is Cloud Computing?

If you're unsure about what Cloud Computing is, you are probably among the 95% of people that are already using cloud services, like online banking and social networks, but don't realize it.

What is Cloud Computing technology?

Cloud computing is a technology that puts your entire computing infrastructure both hardware and software, applications, etc online. It uses Internet and remote central servers to maintain data and applications. Gmail, Yahoo mail, Facebook, Hotmail etc are all the most basic and widely used examples of cloud computing. One does not need his own PC or laptop to check some stored mail/data/photos in the mailbox but any computer with an internet connection since the data is stored with the mail service provider on a remote cloud.

How is computing from the Cloud different from computing from my PC's hard drive?
Unlike traditional computing where data is stored on your PC's local hard drive, the data in the cloud is stored on many physical and/or virtual servers that are hosted by a third-party service provider. An example of a cloud computing file storage provider is Dropbox. Dropbox files can be accessed from any device via the Internet.

How is that done?

To understand how does cloud computing work, imagine that the cloud consists of layers — mostly the back-end layers and the front-end or user-end layers. The front-end layers are the ones you see and interact with. When you access your email on Gmail for example, you are using software running on the front-end of a cloud. The same is true when you access your Facebook account. The back-end consists of the hardware and the software architecture that fuels the interface you see on the front end.

Because the computers are set up to work together, the applications can take advantage of all that computing power as if they were running on one particular machine. Cloud computing also allows for a lot of flexibility. Depending on the demand, you can increase how much of the cloud resources you use without the need for assigning specific hardware for the job, or just reduce the amount of resources assigned to you when they are not necessary

THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF CLOUD COMPUTING SERVICES 

INFRASTRUCTURE AS A SERVICE (IAAS)

Basically, in this type of cloud service, an IT services company provides a virtual machine service to its customers. Virtual machines, servers, storage, network and computing infrastructure are under its responsibility. Kezber’s hosted disaster recovery solution, Online Recovery, is an example of an Infrastructure as a Service cloud service.

PLATFORM AS A SERVICE (PAAS)

This kind of cloud computing is mostly used by clients to delegate computer calculations to the cloud. Web servers, databases and development tools are some examples of what you can do with Platform as a Service cloud service.

SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE (SAAS)

This is the type of cloud service that consumers are most familiar with. In this scenario, companies host services in their IT infrastructure and make it available to their clients through the Internet, often via a web browser. Email services, online games and social networks are some examples of possible uses of Software as a Service cloud computing service

Examples of cloud services 

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Amazon EC2 - Amazon.com provides a variety of different cloud computing services 

Dashlane - Online password service to syncronize and manage passwords between all devices. 

Google App Engine - A service that provides users the ability to create scalable web services that use Google's resources. 

Google Calendar - A way to organize your schedule, synchronize, and share events with your friends. 

Google Docs - A fantastic free solution from Google that allows you to open Microsoft Office documents as well as share them with other users with Internet access. 

Online backup - There are dozens of online backup services to store your important information offsite in the cloud. For example, Copy, Dropbox ,Google Drive etc are good examples of cloud storage and online storage backup solutions that store information in the cloud. 

Windows Azure - A cloud computing solution by Microsoft that allows companies to develop and run services from their cloud.