As discussed in my previous blog on cloud computing, this new form of service is useful for beginners. Small and Medium firms can experiment with their ideas . The cloud solution is inexpensive as the experimentation do not require procuring the underlying infrastructure and it allows you to scale your systems horizontally and the user is supposed to pay only for the storage and compute resources consumed by the application. This setup converts the storage and compute resources into utilities, i.e pay for what you use.
There are advantages and disadvantages for everything we use, it is up to the user to weigh the advantages to decide whether to go for it or not. If we count the advantages of cloud.
- Useful for experimentation.
- High capacity systems available at low cost.
- Accommodates surge computing.
Innovative ideas are meaningful only when put to implementation. Cloud enables innovation as there is less economic burden. People can deploy their experiment on cloud and discard if it is not feasible after deployment.
The end user who uses a cloud pays only for the amount of resources used, it is possible to have high capacity systems at lower prices as compared to owning the systems.
Surge computing is a situation where a particular application might see a sudden spike in the service requests. In a traditional system when this kind of situation occurs the server with its limited capability may go down. As cloud offers horizontal scalability, in case of a spike additional virtual servers are brought up to handle the additional traffic.
When we look at the disadvantages of cloud computing, we can list out the following.
- Security of data stored on a third party server is unknown.
- Confidentiality of data stored and transferred on the cloud is unknown.
Even if there is a security mechanism in place how robust is the mechanism. To gain wide acceptance these issues are to be addressed.
