ITM essay #3

As with any new trend in the IT world, enterprises must figure out the benefits and issues of cloud computing and the best way to use this technology. Cloud computing is “a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet.” (Rouse, 2010, para. 1). Cloud computing consists of three different types of services: 1) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), 2) Platform as a Service (PaaS), and 3) Software as a Service (SaaS). (Laudon & Brabston, 2012). “A cloud may be private or public. A public cloud is maintained by an external service provider accessed through the Internet, and available to the general public. A private cloud is a proprietary network or a data centre that ties together servers, storage, networks, data, and applications as a set of virtualized services shared by users inside a company. Like public clouds, private clouds are able to allocate storage, computing power, or other resources seamlessly to provide computing resources on an as-needed basis” (Laudon & Brabston, 2012). Infrastructure as a Service like Amazon web services provides customers with “processing, storage, networking, and other computing resources from cloud service providers to run their information systems” (Laudon & Brabston, 2012). Platform as a Service “is defined as a set of software and product development tools hosted on the provider’s infrastructure” (Rouse, 2012, para. 5). Software as a Service provides customers to “use software hosted by the vendor on the vendor’s hardware and delivered over a network” (Laudon & Brabston, 2012).

Today, there are many companies that need to store huge amount of data into their system, such as Google and Amazon. Back then, even if they needed to store huge amount of data, there wasn’t a system that could hold all of those data. That is why “companies were sharing vital information with customers, partners, vendors, and contractors to make business processes run more efficiently and economically” (Johnson,

References: Johnson, K. (2012, February 17). Cloud computing hides big issues in corporate data sharing [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/02/17/cloud-computing-hides-big-issues-in-corporate-data-sharing/ Laudon, K. C., Laudon J. P., Brabston, M. E. (2012). Management information systems: Managing the digital firm (6th ed.). Toronto, ON: Pearson Canada Inc. Rouse, M. (2010). Cloud computing. Retrieved from http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/cloud-computing