An overview of Cloud Computing and its Benefits and Flaws

Cloud computing is the buzz word these days. Almost every other company is trying to launch their IT process on the cloud. Let's first understand what  it really means and what are the advantages and disadvantages of putting everything in the cloud.To put it in simple words, anything that is virtual and is managed centrally is on cloud.

We all know what Amazon,ebay,yahoo,google,aol, does.While some of these companies might not be going as strong as the other but they are all part of cloud computing technology. Most of us would still remember when we made our first purchase on Amazon or made a first online search on Google/yahoo.All you had to do was to you enter your details and requirements and the information that you seek was given to you.For e.g if you want to buy a particular watch on amazon.com, you enter its brand name, category(men/woman)
and any other details that you might like and the product is displayed right in front of you.

Now that is  also on the cloud but the information that you get is what you desire. Lets name this as CLOUD A.

Ten years down the line, there has been a major paradigm shift. This decade has seen a spurt in the growth of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, You tube,Linkedin and likewise.

These networking sites keep us updated with what people in our network are doing. Now here, we are not asking for any information but the information is pushed to us . This is called CLOUD B.

Salesforce is based on a Cloud B model. Salesforce is basically divided into 2 segments. Sales cloud and Service cloud. Sales cloud takes care of all your Lead, Account , Contact and  Opportunity management related stuff while Service cloud talks about customer service which might include call center and self service.

Then Salesforce also has a Chatter application integrated to it. Chatter allows to keep yourself updated with any information that you might like to see within your company.Similiar to what we have in Facebook.

Some benefits:

• Multi Tenancy: Common infrastructure is being shared by lots of other companies too. You don't have to worry about maintaining the infrastructure resources, somebody else is doing that for you.
• You pay only for what you need: If there are only 5 users in your company who would be using Salesforce, your company needs to purchase only 5 user licence. No need to spend money buying user licence for the entire 500 employee company which definitely reduces the upfront cost.You can keep scaling up your user licences as and when you need.
• Automatic Upgrades:  This is a very important aspect of cloud computing. Here all the software upgrades are taken care by Salesforce itself. You might be holidaying somewhere and when you return to work , you find that your software has been upgraded without your interference.
• Data Access: You can have access to data at any point of time.

Some Flaws:

• Data is managed by some third party: You have less control over your data.
• You need to have a   long term relationship with the host provider for managing your data.