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-aService (SaaS). The name cloud computing was inspired by the cloud symbol that's often used to represent the Internet in flowcharts and diagrams. Cloud computing refers to the delivery of computing and storage capacity as a service to a heterogeneous community of end recipients. The name comes from the use of clouds as an abstraction or the complex infrastructure it contains in system diagrams[citation needed]. Cloud computing entrusts services with a user's data, software and computation over a network. It has considerable overlap with software as
a service (SaaS).

A cloud service has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional hosting. It is sold on demand, typically by the minute or the hour; it is elastic -- a user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time; and the service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing but a personal computer and Internet access). Significant innovations in virtualization and distributed computing, as well as improved access to high-speed Internet and a weak economy, have accelerated interest in cloud computing. A cloud can be private or public. A public cloud sells services to anyone on the Internet. (Currently, Amazon Web Services is the largest public cloud provider.) A private cloudis a proprietary network or a data center that supplies hosted services to a limited number of people. When a service provider uses public cloud resources to create their private cloud, the result is called a virtual private cloud. Private or public, the goal of cloud computing is to provide easy, scalable access to computing resources and IT services. Infrastructure-as-a-Service like Amazon Web Services provides virtual server instanceAPI) to start, stop, access and configure their virtual servers and storage. In the enterprise, cloud computing allows a company to pay for only as much capacity as is needed, and bring more online as soon as required. Because this pay-for-what-youuse model resembles the way electricity, fuel and water are consumed, it's sometimes referred to as utility computing. Platform-as-a-service in the cloud is defined as a set of software and product development tools hosted on the provider's infrastructure. Developers create applications on the provider's platform over the Internet. PaaS providers may use APIs, website portals or gateway software installed on the customer's computer. Force.com, (an outgrowth of Salesforce.com) and GoogleApps are examples of PaaS. Developers need to know that currently, there are not standards for interoperability or data portability in the cloud. Some providers will not allow software created by their customers to be moved off the provider's platform. In the software-as-a-service cloud model, the vendor supplies the hardware infrastructure, the software product and interacts with the user through a front-end portal. SaaS is a very broad market. Services can be anything from Web-based email to inventory control and database processing. Because the service provider hosts both the application and the data, the end user is free to use the service from anywhere. A hybrid cloud is a composition of at least one private cloud and at least one public cloud. A hybrid cloud is typically offered in one of two ways: a vendor has a private cloud and forms a partnership with a public cloud provider, or a public cloud provider forms a partnership with a vendor that provides private cloud platforms.

2. A hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment in which an organization provides and manages some resources in-house and has others provided externally. For example, an organization might use a public cloud service, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for archived data but continue to maintain in-house storage for operational customer data. Ideally, the hybrid approach allows a business to take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness that a public cloud computing environment offers without exposing mission-critical applications and data to third-party vulnerabilities. This type of hybrid cloud is also referred to as hybrid IT. A federated cloud (also called cloud federation) is the deployment and management of multiple external and internal cloud computing services to match business needs. A federation is the union of several smaller parts that perform a common action. A public cloud is one based on the standard cloud computing model, in which a service provider makes resources, such as applications and storage, available to the general public over the Internet. Public cloud services may be free or offered on a pay-perusage model. Utility storage is a service model in which a provider makes storage capacity available to an individual, an organization or a business unit on a pay-per-use basis. The utility model is sometimes called metered services or storage on demand. Hybrid IT is an approach to enterprise computing in which an organization provides and manages some information technology (IT) resources in-house but uses cloud-based services for others. A hybrid approach allows an enterprise to maintain a centralized approach to IT governance, while experimenting with cloud computing. There are three forces driving the adoption of hybrid IT: an enterprises need to maintain control of data, the cost effectiveness of cloud components such as softwareas-a-service and storage-as-a-service and the desire for an IT department to respond as quickly as possible to rapidly changing business needs. The term hybrid IT is often used interchangeably with the term hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud, however, can also refer to a cloud architecture in which a vendor who has aprivate cloud forms a partnership with a public cloud provider -- or a public cloud provider who forms a partnership with a vendor that provides private cloud platforms. Let's say you're an executive at a large corporation. Your particular responsibilities include making sure that all of your employees have the right hardware and software they need to do their jobs. Buying computers for everyone isn't enough -- you also have to purchase software or software licenses to give employees the tools they require. Whenever you have a new hire, you have to buy more software or make sure your current software license allows another user. It's so stressful that you find it difficult to go to sleep on your huge pile of money every night. Soon, there may be an alternative for executives like you. Instead of installing a suite of software for each computer, you'd only have to load one application. That application would allow workers to log into a Web-based service which hosts all the programs the user would need for his or her job. Remote machines owned by another company would run everything from e-mail to word processing to complex data analysis programs. It's called cloud computing, and it could change the entire computer industry. In a cloud computing system, there's a significant workload shift. Local computers no longer have to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to running applications. The network of computers that make up the cloud handles them instead. Hardware and software demands on the user's side decrease. The only thing the user's computer needs to be able to run is the cloud computing system's interface software, which can be as simple as a Web browser, and the cloud's network takes care of the rest.

There's a good chance you've already used some form of cloud computing. If you have an e-mail account with a Web-based e-mail service like Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail or Gmail, then you've had some experience with cloud computing. Instead of running an e-mail program on your computer, you log in to a Web e-mail account remotely. The software and storage for your account doesn't exist on your computer -- it's on the service's computer cloud.

Cloud insurance is an approach to risk management in which a promise of financial compensation is made for specific potential failures on the part of a computing service provider. The insurance may be included as part of a service level agreement (SLA) with the provider or it may be purchase separately through a third-party insurance company who works with the provider. One of the major reasons traditional IT shops are unwilling to switch to cloud services is the risk associated with security breaches and outages that result in lost business or harm to a companys reputation. Some public cloud providers offer remuneration for time lost when a system is down, but not for the business that is lost while the cloud service is unavailable. A cloud insurance policy would cover the loss of potential business in the event of downtime. Another approach to cloud insurance involves data backup and not financial remuneration. In such a scenario a third-party service provider periodically takes snapshots of the providers cloud environment, including data and applications. This extra backup insurance is intended to assure potential customers that their data is safe and can never be lost. This type of insurance seems to appeal to customers who use the cloud for backing up data that is not sensitive but is still valuable, such as photographs and video. A cloud storage SLA is a service-level agreement between a cloud storage service provider and a customer that specifies details of the service, usually in quantifiable terms. A typical cloud storage SLA articulates precise levels of service such as, for example, 99.9% uptime and the recourse or compensation that the user is entitled to should the provider fail to provide the service as described. Another normal cloud storage SLA detail is service availability, which specifies the maximum amount of time a read request can take, how many retries are allowed and so on. The SLA should also define compensation for users if the specifications arent met. Cloud storage service providers usually offer a tiered service credit plan that gives users credits based on the discrepancy between SLA specifications and the actual service levels delivered. Most public cloud storage services provide details of the service levels that users can expect on their websites and these will likely be the same for all users. However, an enterprise establishing service with a private cloud storage provider may be able to negotiate a more customized deal. In this case an SLA might include specifications for retention policies, the number of copies that will be retained, storage locations and so on. Its important to read an SLA closely and examine the ramifications. For example, 99.9% uptime, a common stipulation, translates to nine hours of outage per year. For some mission critical data, that may not be adequate. You should also check to see how terms are defined. Terri McLure, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Mass., explains: I know of one vendor SLA, for example, that offers 99.9%

uptime. It sounds pretty good. But they don't count downtime unless the client can't access applications for more than 10 minutes. A nine-minute outage is not considered downtime for them in their SLA.