Business Value of Cloud Computing

The significant development of information technology over past few years has led to the increasing demand of resources, extra bandwidth and computational power. Small and medium business companies with their limited budget are finding themselves in the middle of balancing between its client/employee needs and maintaining efficient work environment. In today’s economy the answer for the above problem is ‘Cloud Computing’. Cloud computing offers software and hardware resources and in some cases human services over a distributed environment that can be shared and utilized on demand through internet. Business owners can use these resources as per their requirement even if that is for few hours a day or few days a month and have to pay only for that actual use. Thus this relatively new concept is becoming highly popular among IT organizations because of its flexibility and cost effectiveness. It is highly scalable and also can span quickly according to the requirements of individual organization yet still sharing the same resources.
Classification of Cloud services:
The broad concept of Cloud computing can be classified into the following categories:
1) Software as a Service (SaaS): In this classification traditional or custom made software applications can be served over the internet rather than purchasing the licensed version individually. For example companies like Salesforce.com which provide CRM software to various business owners, Google Apps (word processors, spreadsheet applications) etc which are commonly used. All these are relatively cheaper than purchasing licensed versions and installing them in the internal infrastructure. Here the provider is responsible for updating the product and troubleshoot in case of any issues.
2) Platform as a Service (PaaS): This service includes providing the entire framework and all necessary products to support an entire Software development life cycle (SDLC). Starting with Analysis going all the way through