JitNik's Tech World

Companies looking to reduce their IT costs and complexities are tapping into cloud computing. Ask any five IT specialists what cloud computing is, and you’re likely to get five different answers. So it is pretty evident that Cloud Computing Services means different to everyone. Patni Computers are one of them who are planning to set up labs in India and the US to place its applications and data on the internet. According to Patni’s CEO Jeya Kumar cloud computing will change the way people ‘use, apply and adopt technology’. Patni calls it the ‘Incubation of Technology’. They promise to offer consulting, architecture, development and deployment services to enable customers to exploit Cloud Computing and derive business advantages.



Wipro is also building what it calls the “enterprise cloud” Its nothing but a capability it plans to offer to clients who plan to outsource their hosting or infrastructure management activities with the company. HCL Technologies CEO Vineet Nayar states that cloud-based enterprise services provide an opportunity to create new business models. Its not just another technology as it is a shift in the way IT delivers business capabilities by both corporations and service providers. Microsoft has sketched out a similar vision, in which it would provide extensions to Office for document sharing and collaboration, but that effort remains in very early stages.

What is Cloud Computing?

It basically refers to a style of computing where IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service” over the internet. Thus, Cloud Computing should be capable of providing the end-user, services that have some or all of its characteristics. Cloud computing is still in the “innovation stage” according to IT experts. Hence its vendors will have to be as capable of withstanding IT audits as outsourcers are.





Besides being available over the internet, which apparently is a major advantage other than
Using pay-as-you-go payment model,
Highly flexible for user-specific requirements,
Highly scalable to adjust rise or fall in user’s demand of resources, without having any huge IT infrastructure.

What is Cloud computing usually confused with?

According to me the primary benefit of Cloud Computing is to making IT-enabled services economical in terms of time, resources and money. It’s been around for a while abroad, but now Indian IT companies are catching up fast on cloud computing and are betting big on it. One of its demerits includes that cloud computing does not allow users to physically possess the storage of their data. The exception being the possibility that data can be backed up to a user-owned storage device, such as a USB flash drive or hard disk. It does leave responsibility of data storage and control in the hands of the provider. While the concept of Grid Computing has grown in mindshare and relevance in the industry. Cloud Computing is very often compared to Grid Computing, Utility Computing and Automatic Computing, which doesn’t make any sense because they all differ from each other and they’re nowhere close to what cloud computing means. To perform large tasks from a composition of a cluster of networks is the major function of Grid Computing. While Utility Computing comprises computing resources packaged together as a service which includes computation and storage. And autonomic computing is nothing but systems created to be self-manageable.


SaaS is a type of cloud computing that delivers a single application through the browser to thousands of customers using a complex architecture. SaaS (software as a service) providers such as Salesforce.com. Today, for the most part, IT must plug into cloud-based services individually, but cloud computing aggregators and integrators are already emerging. Computer World reports about Cloud computing not being ready for critical apps. Hence there are feelings of insecurities swirling all around. The cloud storage is a very broad term that incorporates a variety of technologies and business models.May be that’s when it comes to cloud computing, the experts fundamentally offer the same advice. This can be summarized by two very famous quotations, one an old Russian proverb that President Reagan liked to use - “Trust, but verify” - and the other by Intel’s famous former CEO, Andy Grove - “Only the paranoid survive.”