“Cloud Computing”, the latest buzzword in IT services that has made key decision makers to think about adopting cloud computing services for their organizational needs. Are you one of them? If yes, then we can help you in finding whether your decision for moving to cloud is worthy of the efforts and cost involved or not.

While deciding to adopt cloud computing, two main factors to consider are: Selecting the right application to be put on cloud and selecting the right vendor.

First of all, not all applications are suitable for cloud computing environment. Generally it’s not a good idea to put applications of below nature over cloud:

• Mission critical applications like ERP & MIS that are used by more than 80% workforce in organization
• Real-time application with huge uptime requirements
• Business critical & highly secure data centric applications like applications for banking & financial sector

While some of the situations where adopting cloud computing services become a boon for your business can be put together as:

• Smaller or rapidly growing or cash-strapped businesses that require dynamic compute capabilities
• For making IT infrastructure available on-demand without any management headaches
• Lack of people internally to upgrade and maintain the software
• You like to avoid infrastructure, hardware and maintenance cost for hosting application that isn’t high performance; data access in/out is minimal; and, loss of access to isn’t critical like e-mailing application or CRM
• When you need on-demand infrastructure availability on a 24/7 basis

Now, the major factors driving the selection of right vendor includes:

• Pricing & total cost over the retention period of the data
• Information security & data protection levels provided by vendor
• Performance and latency criteria like application response time, transactions per second, and monthly downtime
• Data auditing & backup policies offered by the service provider
• Scalability of resources provided by vendor
• The vendor contract should involve a clause for service credits if the SLA isn’t met
• Financial stability and reliability for the service provider
• Existing customer base
• The level of O&M and help desk provided by the cloud vendor

If you are still confused about whether cloud computing is the right choice for you, we at Rightway are here to serve you and help you in finding the right solution for you. We will listen to your requirements and analyze all aspects of opting for a cloud computing environment for your application before arriving at the right solution for you. So come and take advantage of our cloud computing consultancy & service.

Think of cloud computing and it brings a question in my mind, what does “Cloud” stands for in this context? In verbal sense I can say cloud is something that prohibits me to see through the sky, that hides the vastness and complexity of sky behind it and that encompasses various layers within itself. In that very sense I can define cloud computing as, a paradigm shift in world of computing whereby details are abstracted from the users (developers or end users) who no longer need knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them.

It is a way to increase capacity or add capabilities as and when required, without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT’s existing capabilities.

Broadly, we can divide the cloud services into Cloud Infrastructure Services and Cloud Application Services. Using Cloud Infrastructure Services, one can hire the ready to use infrastructure for deployment and the team can just concentrate on the application development. Such service also gives option to pay per usage, hence you just pay for the duration your application is in use, no need to invest huge amount of money in setting up servers, database and other hardware resources to host the application. Some of the Cloud Infrastructure Providers are Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform, Google AppEngine, Amazon Web Services etc.  While Cloud Application Services allows developers to use common application services available in the cloud, while enabling them to unlock value-added features available from individual providers. For example Salesforce.com’s CRM application, makes available a variety of services that can be used to integrate its functions with your applications.

All of us are taking advantage of this new revolution in one way or the other and has been known to us in different forms e.g. SaaS (Software as a Service), Platform as a Service, Utility Computing, Managed Services, Infrastructure as a Service etc. But whatever it is called, the next generation of computing is ready to rock the IT world.