Understanding the cloud by its counter parts.

Types of Computing

On Premesis Computing

On premesis computing is the typical scenario where all of the necessary infrastructure necessary to your processes is located in your physical location.

• I buy my own hardware.
• I manage my own data center.
• I have complete control and responsibility for my systems.
• I am heavily invested in capital costs.

Hosted Computing

Hosted computing is where you outsource certain physical portions of your IT infrastructure to a hosting company. This is typeically done by either shared hosting or by leased servers depending on the requirements.

• I specify my hardware requirements.
• I pay for a fixed capacity.
• In a shared hosting environment I only control the services I need such as web application hosting.
• I am not required to do updates so my maintenance cost is lowered.
• My services may go down for routine maintenance at times I do not control.
• I probably have restricted bandwitdth that cannot be easily changed.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is something new. Basically it could be described as utility computing where you only pay for the actual consumption of resources you require at any given time.

• I can purchase computing power on the fly.
• I have no hardware specification requirements only service requirements.
• I pay for only the data storage I require.
• I can configure the computing and storage services to meet my exact requirements.
• I can manage my computing resources myself.
• My resources are abstracted from a pool of servers so uptime is guaranteed at 99.99%
• I pay as I go for only the services I require.
• I can scale up my computing power and storage requirements any time I need to and then scale them back down again if I so desire.