If you are a seasoned IT vet, cloud computing is not a new concept – just a relatively new marketing phrase to explain offsite applications and data management. The phrase helps make the concept more accessible to people who need this type of technical solution. For some customers, you may think “Does that mean all my information and data is floating in some hyperspace air cloud surrounding me?” Cloud computing actually involves very large machines at a different location that hold and store all your data.
Cloud computing, a term designed by marketers to make the concept more accessible now has its own set of acronyms and symbols. Making it, not as accessible a concept as it is meant to be.
Before you delve into the world of cloud computing, we thought this handy index would help give you a quick review of common cloud computing phrases.
IaaS, SaaS and Paas—say what?
Infrastructure as a Service: a cloud computing provider has all the equipment, location, hardware, and space to save all your data
Platform as a Service: including the infrastructure, PaaS also has the software needed to access the cloud from any access point.
Software as a Service: this software is accessible online and powered by your cloud.
Types of Clouds
Public cloud: this is when you have an external cloud provider like Tanaza holding all your data and is at a separate location.
Private cloud: if you have your own hardware, you can provide your own cloud computing capabilities.
Hybrid cloud: not the Prius kind, but the ability to run both private and public clouds.
Having your own private cloud can sometimes mean high purchasing costs for the hardware. And you still have your information stored virtually.
Online and Compute Storage
These are two different service options. Compute storage is through your virtual servers. And sometimes, those can get backed up with data and pretty soon you will need more hard drive space. But with online storage, you can access your files remotely in an offsite location.
Horizontal or Vertical Compute?
Now you get to choose between horizontal or vertical compute. Simply, horizontal refers to how many servers you need and vertical is when you increase the space within a server.
The Cloud has Burst!
If you have a particularly busy season or a month when you need lots of cloud computing, you can ramp up the servers. Then, when you aren’t as busy anymore, you can either stop cloud computing services or just scale some down.
Cloud Compute and Virtual Private Server (VPS)
VPS uses a hardware like cloud computing but isn’t as easy to manage. Cloud computing on the other hand, has back up services (redundancy), many access points, and easier manageability.
The Burst Turned into a Storm
Some may refer to the term “cloud storm” which means several different cloud computing services are used at once for one computing environment. Sometimes you need more back up locations or a cloud in the right time zone.
For more information, visit Ninefold’s blog, The Fold.