Understanding Cloud Computing

Cloud hosting is an aspect of business one cannot dare ignore. The servers used can be created, destroyed, or modified on demand. Cloud hosting has evolved, bringing the best of experience for the customers. Below, we lo at some of the aspects like history, importance, and how cloud hosting works.

cloud computing

What Cloud Hosting Services are Available?

Cloud hosting services cover a huge variety of options now, from the fundamentals of storage, networking, and processing power through to natural language processing and artificial intelligence (AI) as well as standard office applications. Almost every service that doesn’t require one to be close physically to the computer hardware that you are using can now be delivered via the cloud.

Examples of Cloud Hosting?

Cloud hosting supports a large number of services. The services include Gmail or the cloud back-up of the photos, though to the services that enable big organizations to host and run all their data applications in the cloud. For example, Netflix depends on cloud hosting services to run its streaming service.  It is becoming a must-have option for many apps. This has seen software vendors increasingly offering their applications as services over the internet rather than standalone products as they try to switch to a subscription model. Nonetheless, there is a possible disadvantage to cloud hosting, in that it may introduce new risks and costs to the companies using them.

Why is It Called Cloud Hosting?

An important point to understand behind cloud hosting services is that the location, hardware, and the OS (operating system), are mainly immaterial to the customer. With his in mind, it is easy to understand how the metaphor of the cloud was borrowed from old telecoms network schematics. Previously, the public telephone network was often represented as a cloud to show that it is not of importance. The definition can be labeled as an over-simplification as the location of the servers remains a crucial thing to the customers.

History of Cloud Hosting

The term cloud hosting has been around since the early 2000s, though the idea of computing-as-service has been in existence for quite long. Currently, you can get these services from various providers including HostingRaja the famous cloud hosting providers India. The whole concept can be traced as early as the 1960s when computer bureaus allowed companies to rent time on mainframe rather than purchasing one themselves.

The ‘time-sharing’ services were made obsolete due to the rise of people owning PCs. Also, the growth of corporate data centers allowed companies to take care of and store their data. However, the idea of renting access to computing power has resurfaced severally in application service providers, grid computing, and utility computing. This was followed by cloud hosting, which became even more critical with the emergence of software as a service and hyper-scale cloud hosting providers such as AWS (Amazon Web Services).

Importance of Cloud Hosting

According to IDC research, the building of infrastructure that supports cloud hosting services now accounts for more than a third of all IT spending in the world. As a result, spending on traditional in-house IT continues to drop as the most workload is being moved to the cloud, either through public services offered by vendors or through private clouds built by enterprises.

451 Study forecasts that about one-third of enterprise IT expenditure will be on cloud hosting services in the coming years “indicating the growing dependence on external sources of infrastructure, application, management and security services.” Analyst Gartner expects that almost half of international enterprises using cloud services now will have fully adopted the services by 2021. Also, Gartner predicts that global spending on these services will reach $260bn up from $219.6bn posted previously. The growth is much more than was foreseen though question marks remain on how much demands is from businesses that are adopting the cloud services.

Some of the aspects, like the available service provider, are important to know if one is to get the best services. Cloud hosting is here to stay hence, businesses must adapt to this change. Those that will adapt quickly will benefit while it might take time for others to catch up.