Taking A Look At Cloud Hosting

Subscriptions to cloud hosting services can allow a company to avoid having to acquire IT assets recognized in the balance sheet as CAPEX and requiring amortization period. IT costs can be recorded as operating expenses.

Cloud hosting is currently revolutionizing data backup companies. The data is stored on the server and managed by the backup provider online. The user saves the data in the cloud using software accessible via the Internet. The online provider is responsible for storing data. For large companies to store their data on external hard drives is much more expensive than on cloud hosting services. It all depends on the amount of storage required.

In the general case, there are four main service models including: Software as a Service (SaaS), Data as a Service (DaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and three deployment models of cloud computing: internal private cloud, managed internally by a company according to its needs.

External private cloud, or private, dedicated to the specific needs of a single company, but whose management is outsourced to a service provider. Public clouds, managed by specialized companies that lease their services to many companies.

User access is done mostly through a web browser. The characteristics of the cloud are qualified under the term elastic computing. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has given a succinct definition that includes these basic principles: “Cloud computing is a model for establishing a network access to a shared configurable computing resources (network servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly mobilized and made available by minimizing management efforts and contacts with the provider service.”

The promotion of public cloud hosting is made possible by the spread of Internet access for individuals (with 75% of households have Internet at home, according to 2011 data) and businesses. The phenomenon has also benefited from the substantial increase in the power of computer equipment, which allowed the hosts to offer attractive rates.

The considerable increase in power of the servers (the servers operating frequency has been multiplied by a factor of 10 between 1998 and 2008 processors contain between 4 and 10 cores); and lower storage costs (for the price of a 1.2 GB hard drive in 2000, was in 2013 a record 1000 GB).

Companies no longer have their computer servers, but are expected to access services online without having to manage the underlying infrastructure. Applications and data are no longer on the local computer, but – in an imaginative way – in a cloud consisting of interconnected remote servers. Given the complexity of network links, and the multiplicity of actors (ISP, host, editor, distributor, dealer), operating in the cloud reduces the costs compared to a professional quality application hosted internally.