What is Cloud Hosting?

Cloud computing is one of the latest buzz phrases in the IT industry, often hailed as the next new thing; an aspect of computing that will soon be taken up wholescale. Many of us are using cloud computing environments without realising that we are doing so: Google Docs for example is a cloud computing environment, though we may not immediately recognise it as such.

Cloud computing offers companies the ability to develop, deploy and exploit applications in an on-demand environment that is typically hosted externally by a third party. This is known in the vernacular of cloud computing as a public cloud, which is defined by a supplier providing cloud environments to many different clients. On the other hand, private cloud computing is defined as when a company owns its own cloud operation, either hosted internally or in a demarcated area of a third party’s data centre that is only used by the one client.

Companies are increasingly turning to cloud computing as the technology develops and becomes more reliable. Any company that requires the hosting of business applications can potentially benefit from cloud computing, paying as they go for resources used. The cloud computing environment has the advantage of being scalable; upwards in times of high demand and downwards when the application is less required. As this change in resource level management is accomplished by the cloud supplier, there is no need for the client company to have to invest in or divest itself of equipment, as demand dictates.

Companies considering hosting their applications in a cloud computing environment should consider three factors: reliability, availability and scalability.

Reliability is the measure of whether a company is fully committed to cloud computing. Perhaps they have merely re-badged one of their existing offerings in order to appear to be up on technical breakthroughs such as cloud computing. The company needs to understand cloud computing as it evolves as well as the needs of its cloud computing clients.

Availability encompasses concerns such as SLAs, disaster recovery procedures, technical support and uptime statistics. These will vary from provider to provider.

Scalability determines the extent to which and the speed with which a cloud supplier can change the levels of processing power, storage capacity etc. according to the changing demands of the client.