Cloud computing has become one of the most popular buzzwords in the tech world, and it’s easy to see why. Cloud computing brings many benefits, such as reduced cost and time needed to complete projects and access to enterprise-level tools and resources, but it isn’t right for every business or project. Before you make your next business decision, read this guide to find out which cloud computing services are essential, which ones are optional, and which ones you can do without entirely.
What is Cloud Computing
Cloud computing can be defined as a way to access a shared pool of configurable IT resources and services that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. The cloud model provides many benefits for its users, but it also brings potential risks because shared resources are often less secure than dedicated resources. Because security needs to be considered from day one, applications that use clouds need to make sure they have appropriate authorization, authentication, access control, logging and auditing features in place. Users must understand that although centralizing processing on a remote server might help optimize performance, using public clouds could expose data or processes to risks they wouldn’t face if they hosted them on-premises.
Software as a Service (SaaS)
In software development, standards-based interoperability refers to a framework in which people can interact with each other’s software applications and data, using agreed-upon protocols. Cloud computing technology is unique in that it has no specific set of standards or regulations (yet) to fall back on; instead, vendors rely on their own proprietary frameworks. In practice, cloud users are typically required to use a single vendor’s platform if they want access to any data and/or applications across multiple clouds. A standards-based approach could change all that by allowing people to pick whatever platform or vendor they wanted without sacrificing compatibility and usability. Sounds great, right? It is so why isn’t anyone trying to make it happen? Well, there are some good reasons why third-party platforms would resist such a transition. and one huge reason they’d welcome it: Innovation. There’s one thing preventing cloud providers from bringing innovation into their platforms at record speeds: Their customers might be on another platform already.
But what if you weren’t locked into any particular vendor and what if your data was accessible from anywhere anyway?
All things considered, you might be more willing to try something new and innovate at unprecedented levels of speed. To that end, SaaS solutions hold enormous potential for revolutionizing everything we know about software development as we know it today.
Standards-Based Interoperability
Cloud-based services are designed to be interoperable, which means they play nicely with existing software and hardware without needing any changes. The term has become popular in recent years, but its meaning has remained largely unchanged since at least 1999. In fact, you don’t even need to know what interoperability means to use it the word just sounds good when it comes up during a meeting or press release. Instead of asking why you need standards-based interoperability, ask yourself how much time and money you’ll save by having your documents automatically stored on Dropbox (for example). It’s that easy! And don’t worry if you can’t see how one technology integrates another because that’s exactly what standards are for: to create minimal levels of compatibility between devices and technologies. If everyone could figure out where everything plugs into everything else, things would actually get really annoying fast. Now go ahead and bask in your newfound understanding of such jargon as vendor neutrality and semantic data mode.
