Hardware and Software Technology

Technology

Hardware and Software Technology

This paper examines contemporary hardware and software trends. Cloud computing is an emerging technology offering computer applications and services that are typically delivered over the Internet on a subscription or pay-per-resource basis. The services are available from data centers that are physically located all over the world, which taken together, are referred to as the "cloud." (The Internet is frequently represented by a cloud in software and networking diagrams.) Clouds may be either public or private. Companies like IBM (Gaultier, 2011) and Microsoft promote the use of private clouds which typically consist of sets of servers run by government agencies or large companies for the exclusive use of their employees (Rosoff, 2011).

Cloud computing allows users to connect to resources running on servers that may be shared or pooled, as opposed to a single dedicated server, as is often the case using the client-server computing model of recent years. Typically each application ran on a specific piece of hardware which, if it was down, required the user to connect to a backup server or suffer an interruption in service (Rosoff, 2011).

Cloud computing brings a more efficient way to access web applications, blurring the lines between desktop and the Internet. Before cloud computing, companies ran their applications on their own servers, hosted either at the company's own data center or in its own location. This arrangement was fairly labor intensive and expensive, requiring dedicated real estate, IT staff, security and so forth. With cloud computing, businesses are able to move a significant amount of their computing to cloud services providing the same applications previously installed on their own servers. The company's users are then able to access the applications over the Internet (HowToGeek, 2011).

There are several types of cloud computing services available from cloud computing providers. Software as a service (SaaS) provides end-user applications running on pooled hardware resources that are accessed over a network. From the customer's perspective, there is no upfront investment required for either software licensing or servers (Knorr & Gruman, 2011).

Infrastructure as a service, also known as utility computing, is another cloud computing service. IBM, Sun, and others offer virtual servers and storage that an IT department can access on demand. Providers offer various capabilities, including helping IT create virtual datacenters or providing computational capacity as a virtualized resource pool accessible over the network (Knorr & Gruman, 2011).

Companies switch to cloud computing because of the benefits. Along with the efficiency, a business takes advantage of lower hardware and IT costs. They also benefit from increased agility and being able to quickly add capacity. Also, there is the additional benefit of flexibility, paying only for what the company needs. Before cloud computing, businesses would estimate how many software licenses they needed for the upcoming year, and if they bought too many licenses, they were stuck with them. SaaS services, on the other hand, are typically billed per user per month, while infrastructure and platform services are billed according to the actual capacity used (Rosoff, 2011).

An example of a popular business application available with cloud computing is Salesforce.com's customer relationship management and business management services (Rosoff, 2011). SaaS is also used for human resources applications as well as enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications (Knorr & Gruman, 2011).