 | Zach Adams is the marketing manager for Craw-Kan Telephone Cooperative. Craw-Kan offers cooperative members security systems, local telephone, long distance, high speed internet, digital cable television, IP television and cellular phone service. Zach can be contacted directly at Craw-Kan (620)724-8235 or by emailing zach@ckt.net. |
Communications
2011-11-21 13:11:26
What is cloud computing?
A: You are not alone in wondering! That’s because cloud computing and the term, have not been around very long and has had a difficult time connecting a very specific definition to it. While some define it in a narrow way and others very broad, we only have room to address it in a basic way.
Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the internet. These services are broadly divided into three categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
A cloud service has three characteristics that make it different from traditional hosting.
• It is sold on demand usually by
the minute or the hour.
• It is “elastic” meaning a user
can have as much or as little of a
service as they want at any time.
• The service is fully managed by
the provider, meaning the
consumer needs nothing more
than a personal computer and
internet access for it to work.
A cloud can be private or public. A public cloud sells services to anyone on the Internet. A private cloud is a proprietary network or a data center that supplies hosted services to a limited number of people. Whether it is public or private, the goal of cloud computing is to provide easy access to computing resources and Internet Technology services.
Next month, we will discuss the three categories of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
