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Cloud Computing

Cloud computing.jpg

Cloud Computing is the modern-day external hard drive. It is not physical, tangible drive but a drive located on the internet "cloud." It is a model to enable convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources such as networks, storage, large capacity servers, applications, and most importantly services. In a cloud server, you are saving data in programs over the internet on specific programs. "Cloud" means any data that can be accessed over the internet from any part of the world and anytime.

Dropbox

Founder of Dropbox, Drew Houston

Dropbox is a cloud storage and file hosting software that is headquartered in San Francisco, California. It was founded by MIT student Drew Houston. Dropbox is one of the first file hosting software that made cloud services available to the masses. Dropbox lets users save music, photos, and other multimedia as well as documents over the internet for them to access at any time over the application or website. Users are given 2GB to use freely at no charge. Dropbox also grants users the ability to add up to 16GB of additional free space by referring friends to use this cloud service. Standard paid plans of up to 1TB to exist for Dropbox, which currently costs $9.99/month, which equates to about $120 a year. To share a file, the user can generate a URL for it from the Dropbox website and send it out so that others can view it. Folders can be shared by sending an invitation from the Dropbox website. Recipients that don’t have Dropbox accounts will have to sign up to get access to the folder. Once a folder is shared, it will appear in the folder system for everyone who has access to it and all members will be able to make changes to files. All versions of files are saved. Dropbox gives 5 gigabytes of storage for free to new users and gives users an incentive to increase the storage by sharing the app to new users. Dropbox charges a fee to use an increment of over 5 gigabytes. Approximately 500 million people use Dropbox for work and 1,200,000,000 files are saved every day on Dropbox. Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag


Google Drive

Google Drive

Google Drive is a cloud storage software platform created by the Google team. It was launched on April 24, 2012. Google Drive gives 15 gigabytes of free cloud storage to new users. Google Drive provides fast and efficient synchronization system that lets users save the files automatically. It is also integrated with Google other applications such as Google Docs, spreadsheet, and presentations. Users can use Google Drive to share documents with peers and the document can be edited real time, making collaboration so much more efficient. The major highlight of Google Drive is the ability to synchronize immediately when the files are linked to the application over the internet. Offline viewing and editing are available for the document when the application reconnects with the internet it gets synchronized immediately. [1]

Box

Box is a cloud storage application that is more geared towards content and file sharing management for businesses. Box offers three types of cloud storage services, which is enterprise, business and personal. Box enterprise service provides cloud bases data management services for big companies such as General Electric, Procter and Gamble and Schneider Electric. These fortune 500 companies rely on box online storage to back up their large masses of data. Box business services provide cloud storage for small business and rising businesses to have a protected cloud data management. Box also has a lot of personal storage users as well. The application gives the option to users to decide what they want too with a shared document, and who can view it. The company has a high valuation from venture investor, they were funded by 150 million dollars to expand overseas and dominate the European market. [2]

Amazon Cloud

Amazon Cloud lets you store files and synchronize on up to eight devices.

Amazon is becoming a leading company in cloud storage services. Amazon Cloud lets you put files in multiple devices simultaneously. Jeff Bezos founder of Amazon released this product in 2011. Prior to having public cloud services, Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud was the cloud storage drive that let users save application packages and bundles. It let start-ups to create their products and share it among employees to engineer products from a cloud drive. Dropbox used Amazon EC2 cloud services to backup users files in the cloud system until recently they created servers of their own to manage storage. Amazon was an early factor for Dropbox cloud storage success.[3] Unlike other cloud storage system for a fixed annual price, Amazon Cloud users can upload unlimited raw files to their cloud storage. [4] Amazon grants free unlimited storage for Prime members (Prime Member unlimited storage pertains only to photos and other non-videos; you have a 5GB limit for videos). For non-Prime members, you have the option to pay $11.99/year for unlimited photos and 5GB of videos or unlimited everything for $59.99/year (about $5 a month).

Amazon cloud is one of the most used cloud services in today's society. Amazon web services is one the most used servers for companies across the board; allowing for the ability to scale to your needs. This especially popular among companies just beginning because they all have to pay for the services they have used. They do not need to pay for storage they may not use. This makes them very powerful in this game of cloud computing and cloud storage. This also works in reverse; providing server capabilities as a company grows. This service is elastic. [5]

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OneDrive

OneDrive.jpg

OneDrive is Microsoft's cloud service that enables users to access data storage via the internet. Users are allowed to sync in data files via the internet, where "users later have access to their sync files from a web browser or mobile device." The unique service provided by OneDrive, compared to other clouding services, is the fact that users can share files with other individuals. Currently, the storage limit in OneDrive is 1TB, with a paid Microsoft subscription. [6] When Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he turned the "internal competition" mindset of the company, to an outward cloud-oriented vision, centered on the One Drive Service.

iCloud

Apple

Apple's own cloud storage service, iCloud is probably one of the more prevalent cloud storage services available to consumers. You can upload just about any type of file onto your cloud. Apple grants users a free 5GB to use for virtually anything (including your iPhone information backups). As with all Apple products, you pay a premium for the Apple brand and platform. Paid plans up to 1TB exist, at which you are required to pay $19.99 a month which roughly equates to $240 a year for cloud storage. While Apple is definitely the most expensive cloud service, you pay for the ability to seamlessly transfer and upload images, docs, videos, etc. across the Apple platform. If you own numerous Apple products, this cloud storage, albeit expensive, is probably the most convenient and enticing option available.


Verizon Cloud

Verizon Cloud

Verizon Cloud is a cloud storage service provided by Verizon Wireless to its' customers at no charge. Verizon's cloud allows for any type of file to be uploaded. Customers are able to use up to 5GB of cloud storage for free, with Verizon also granting customers the option to upgrade their cloud service up to 1TB for $9.99 a month, which is about $120 a year. You can store just about any type of file and you can also backup your contacts and information from your phone onto the cloud.


Enterprise Cloud Computing

Enterprise Cloud

Cloud computing also exists at the enterprise level (Oracle Cloud, SalesForce, and Amazon Web Services). In recent years, there has been a significant push for large companies moving to the cloud in order to scale their technology infrastructure, understand their businesses through Big Data and business intelligence, and be more cost-effective within the IT organizations. Its characteristics are on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service. Enterprise cloud computing is one of the biggest trends of the information age for the next few years as businesses consolidate their technology stack and become more dependent on the cloud. Therefore, the powerful computing ability of cloud computing can be used in different industry field includes market development trend prediction, predicting the climate change, even nuclear explosion simulation.

Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud

Founded in 2009, Alibaba Cloud is the world's leading cloud computing and artificial intelligence technology company, providing secure and reliable computing and data processing capabilities in the form of online public services, making computing and artificial intelligence a Pratt & Whitney technology. Alibaba Cloud serves leading companies in manufacturing, finance, government, transportation, medical, telecommunications, energy and many other fields, including China Unicom, 12306, Sinopec, PetroChina, Philips, Huada Gene, and other large enterprise customers, as well as Weibo and Zhibo. In the challenging application scenarios such as Tmall Double 11 Global Carnival and 12306 Spring Festival ticket purchase, Alibaba Cloud maintains a good running record.[7].

In 2014, Alibaba Cloud helped users defend against the biggest DDoS attacks in the history of the Internet, with peak traffic reaching 453.8 Gb per second. [8] In the Sort Benchmark 2016 Sorting Competition CloudSort project, Alibaba Cloud broke the AWS's $4.51/TB record with a ranking of $1.44/TB. At Sort Benchmark 2015, Aliyun used the self-developed distributed computing platform ODPS to complete 100TB data sorting in 377 seconds, which refreshed the world record of Apache Spark 1406 seconds.

Apsara Stack was founded in February 2009. It is a very large-scale general-purpose computing operating system independently developed and serviced by Alibaba Cloud. It provides services to innovative entrepreneurs, governments, and organizations in more than 200 countries and regions around the world. Apsara Stack hopes to solve the problem of scale, efficiency, and security of human computing. It can connect millions of servers all over the world into a supercomputer, providing computing power to society in the form of online public services. The revolutionary nature of Apsara Stack is to integrate the three directions of cloud computing: to provide sufficient computing power, to provide general computing power, and to provide inclusive computing power.[9]

Alibaba Cloud first set up the first data center outside mainland China in Hong Kong, and then set up data centers in Singapore, the western United States and the east. In the future, Alibaba Cloud will open new data centers in Dubai, Europe, Japan and other places to export China's high-tech services. At present, Alibaba Cloud has opened data centers in 13 regions including China (North China, East China, South China, Hong Kong), Singapore, the United States (US East, West America), Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and Japan. [10] On Alibaba Cloud, enterprises can manage cloud applications in the US and China with a single account to achieve unified deployment operations. In the future, Alibaba Cloud will continue to invest in international resources in the “Belt and Road Initiative” with the goal of providing 70% of global computing power.

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure, formerly known as Windows Azure, is Microsoft's public cloud computing platform. It provides a range of cloud services, including compute, analytics, storage and networking. Users can pick and choose from these services to develop and scale new applications, or run existing applications in the public cloud. Azure offers 4 different forms of cloud computing: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and serverless. Microsoft charges for Azure on a pay-as-you-go basis, meaning subscribers receive a bill each month that only charges them for the specific resources they have used. Azure's most popular use is running virtual machines or containers in the cloud. These compute resources can host infrastructure components, such as domain name system (DNS) servers; Windows Server services -- such as Internet Information Services (IIS); or third-party applications. Microsoft also supports the use of third-party operating systems, such as Linux. Azure is also commonly used as a platform for hosting databases in the cloud. Microsoft offers serverless relational databases such as Azure SQL and non-relational databases such as NoSQL. In addition, the platform is frequently used for backup and disaster recovery. [11]


Advantages of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has various pros associated with it. Hence why many are moving away from traditional storage options. Scalability has become a tremendous advantage for cloud users. Scalability is the ability of the computing process to be used or produced in a range of capabilities. Scalability can be seen in either of two ways, vertical or horizontal. Vertical scalability refers to adding more power to an existing instance. Horizontal scalability refers to adding more servers to spread the load across multiple machines. Cloud computing provides expanded access for users. [12]

Another type of advantage, probably the most essential, is the cost savings. Acquisition costs are lower because equipment can be rented and software licenses are becoming subscription based. Pricing models are more predictable as you have the option to pay per month, pay as you go or pay per use. Cloud implementation has longer life spans, and software hardly ever becomes obsolete because it is constantly being updated by the developers. Software is easier to update and manage in the cloud. [13]


Problems with Cloud Computing

Although cloud computing might be seen as convenient, a lot of issues have arisen where celebrities have been exposed by their clouds getting hacked. Celebrities such as Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton have had experienced where their clouds were hacked and revealing photos were stolen [14] The hack occurred on Apple's iCloud in 2014, however, many still patronize the cloud for its convenience and ease of access. In order to ensure safety while using the cloud, be sure to monitor the type of information you're putting in. For example, do not trust that information such as pictures, credit card information, social security and more will be protected.

References

  1. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303459004577362111867730108
  2. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/technology/box-a-data-storage-company-prepares-to-expand-in-europe.html?_r=0
  3. http://www.wired.com/2016/03/epic-story-dropboxs-exodus-amazon-cloud-empire/
  4. https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/pricing?ref_=cd_home_navpricing
  5. https://aws.amazon.com/free/?trk=ps_a131L0000085EJuQAM&trkCampaign=acq_paid_search_brand&sc_channel=ps&sc_campaign=acquisition_US&sc_publisher=google&sc_category=core-main&sc_country=US&sc_geo=NAMER&sc_outcome=acq&sc_detail=amazon%20web%20services&sc_content=Brand_amazon_web_services_e&sc_segment=423740514695&sc_medium=ACQ-P%7CPS-GO%7CBrand%7CDesktop%7CSU%7CAWS%7CCore%7CUS%7CEN%7CText&s_kwcid=AL!4422!3!423740514695!e!!g!!amazon%20web%20services&ef_id=CjwKCAjw7-P1BRA2EiwAXoPWAy1L35z6o3OKiLMMqO90twMtLY70WFix6lIbwNAiHF-Rio5Q3iEbnRoCLeEQAvD_BwE:G:s&s_kwcid=AL!4422!3!423740514695!e!!g!!amazon%20web%20services&all-free-tier.sort-by=item.additionalFields.SortRank&all-free-tier.sort-order=asc
  6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneDrive
  7. https://us.alibabacloud.com/?utm_content=se_1000128136&gclid=Cj0KCQjwtr_mBRDeARIsALfBZA7eTQ_S1XgB-x2-WWcnfkR8AiyjyaQl0nm9gMdZ-O7aNrN_gFRcNZMaAv8eEALw_wcB/
  8. http://digi.163.com/14/1225/06/AE9Q3T7J001618H9.html
  9. https://www.alibabacloud.com/product/apsara-stack
  10. http://tech.sina.com.cn/it/2016-11-21/doc-ifxxwrwh4842788.shtml
  11. https://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/Windows-Azure
  12. https://linuxacademy.com/blog/cloud/scalability-cloud-computing/
  13. https://www.saasplaza.com/blog/Calculating-Cloud-Computing-Cost-Savings/
  14. http://time.com/3247717/jennifer-lawrence-hacked-icloud-leaked/