You hear a lot about "migrating to the cloud." Using Internet technologies, cloud computing gives users scalable IT solutions that are hosted offsite in data centers, which look nothing like clouds. Cloud computing is a hot trend that many companies are taking advantage of, but is the cloud right for your organization?
According to IDC, the fastest growing sector in the new cloud IT market is Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). This consists of providing users virtual machines and other resources to manage tasks over the Internet, and it's scalable to the user's needs. Additional services offered over the cloud include firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual-machine disk image library, raw (block) and file-based storage, virtual local area networks (VLANs), and software bundles. With IaaS, the cost will reflect the resources allocated and consumed, making it an attractive option for businesses wanting to take advantage of these services without having to purchase and maintain their own IT infrastructure.
In October of 2013, Adobe disclosed to their 2.9 million customers that their hosted information was compromised due to a data breach. Adobe sent out letters stating, "The attackers may have obtained access to your Adobe ID and encrypted password." For anyone that uses companies like Adobe to host their data, you will want to be prepared for a breach.
Many people believe cloud computing takes place in actual clouds and is therefore affected by the weather. In reality, the clouds in the sky do not affect computers, and information is actually stored in data centers that look nothing like clouds. Even though virtual clouds and real clouds are different, we can compare them in order to learn about cloud computing.