QUE: What is Cloud Computing? Discuss its technologies and benefits.

 Cloud computing generally means Digital Data Storage. It is a technology that provides virtual resources over a network.

•  Cloud Computing Technologies
  

•  Virtualization: Providing the facility of sharing an application or resource among multiple organizations.
  
•  Service Oriented Architecture: Providing services to other components through an application component through a communication protocol.
  
•  Data-driven: Mostly focused on data.
  
• Scalability: Has the ability to work as per the user’s needs.
  
•  Utility Component: Pay Per User is modem-based.
  
• Benefits of Cloud Computing
  

•  Access to anyone.
  
•  Applications can be changed online over time.
  
•  No need to download special software.
  
• Platform independent – On-demand self-service, low cost, more data storage, eco-friendly system.
  
•  Cloud computing can provide various services through Saas (Software as a service), Paas (Platform as a Service) and Iaas (Infrastructure as a service).
  
•  Applications of Cloud Computing:

• Infrastructure Scaling: Many organizations including retail have very different computing capacity requirements. This fluctuation can be easily accommodated by cloud computing.
  
• Disaster Recovery: Instead of building more data centers to ensure continuity during disasters, businesses use cloud computing to securely back up their digital assets.
  
•  Data Aggregator: Cloud computing relieves overburdened data centers by storing large amounts of data, making it more accessible, facilitating analysis and simplifying backup.
  
•  Application Development: Cloud computing provides enterprise developers with immediate access to tools and platforms for application development and testing, which reduces time to market.
  
•  Big Data Analytics: Cloud computing provides almost unlimited resources to process large amounts of data to accelerate research and reduce time to insights.
  

                            Thus, retail, railways, manufacturing, banking, education and healthcare have all started using cloud services. At the same time, cloud computing has enormous growth potential for Indian companies and is opening new doors of opportunity. At such a time, such technology should be used efficiently through proper regulation, control and mutual cooperation.