People use the cloud as a buzzword when describing either the internet or an intranet which is in association with some type of service. When you hear the term ‘public cloud’ think of the internet, when you come across like ‘private cloud’ it’s like your own company’s intranet. Actually ‘cloud’ by itself refers to the public cloud.
Internet or intranet application and services that you typically access, run or manage via web browser is referred as cloud computing. You can say that the cloud computing is a delivery of computing by cloud web hosting providers as a service rather than as a product. Instead of purchasing, installing and running a program on your local computer, the program runs on the provider’s computer, and you pay monthly or yearly fees for access. There are three main types of cloud computing service provider
1. Software as a service (SaaS): - it provides like Google Docs, Microsoft Office 365 and Sales force are the service designed for the end users. They represent the end result of cloud computing.
2. Platform as a service (PaaS): - It offers like Window Azure these are the service which is used by IT personnel use in application development and web hosting to end users. Basically here your IT staff will get remote access to virtual computers hosted at the provider’s data centers. cloud web hosting providers in PaaS provide typically managed Windows or Linux OS (operating system) which means that your business can dedicate more resources to development and fewer to configuring and maintaining the OS.
3. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS): - It offers like Amazon EC@ and Rackspace cloud hosting which are a little bit similar like PaaS providers, but the difference is they usually offer your IT personnel more control over the OS. Your business can use the raw infrastructure to develop and deploy application on pretty much any platform or OS.
Microsoft’s cloud storage lets you store structured or unstructured data for use with your applications managed APIs. You can also mount storage or virtual hard drive by using the Windows Azure Drive feature and you can move your virtual hard drive between private and public clouds.
