What is Cloud Hosting?

Cloud Hosting - an introduction...

The term ‘Cloud’ is a metaphor for ‘Internet’. It originated from the literal ‘fluffy cloud’ image so beloved of illustrators when physically depicting the internet on IT architecture diagrams.  “Cloud Computing” therefore simply translates as ‘Internet Computing” and has come to mean ‘computing resources that are delivered over the internet as a service’.

 Over recent years, ‘Cloud’ has  suffered from a lack of definition, and has come to mean many things for many people and is generally used as a umbrella term for many seemingly independent computing trends such as: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Grid Computing,  elastic computing, on demand computing, utility computing amongst others.

Using this logic, “Cloud Hosting” simply describes the ‘Hosting’ of these computing resources delivered via the internet - the physical infrastructure on which the internet services reside.

For us the definition of Cloud Hosting is simple. We consider that cloud hosting gives organisations access to ‘a resilient, high availability ‘infrastructure as a service’ solution that offers selected IT outsourcing at lower cost than in-house’  or quite simply IT economies and efficiencies of scale at an affordable price. We provide, manage and service the hosting infrastructure and you use it when you want and as often as you want – paying only for the services that you utilise/consume.

Cloud Hosting will deliver organisations:

• A Zero Capital Expenditure Model
• On Demand Extension/Expansion of existing infrastructure
• Unlimited Scalability
• Capacity on Demand
• Managed Options
• Total Control
• Energy Efficiency & Reduced Carbon Footprint

 
Why would an organisation utilise Cloud Hosting?

With the cloud hosting model, high availability is simple and affordable, and disaster recovery and resilience are dramatically cheaper. The ability to use computing services without need for Infrastructure provides organisations with many benefits, over and above the cost of capex. For example:  Servers can be set up in minutes, new services and applications can be deployed, tested and fine tuned before being released to production environments, negating the usual install delays and internal procurement processes. Seasonal traffic spikes can be countered and simply managed using on demand cloud capacity and disaster recovery becomes a reality. General benefits include:

• On demand capacity for traffic spikes and storage
• Rapid test & development environments
• Mirrored Disaster Recovery
• Access to latest technology
• OS agnostic
• On hand 24 x 7 support
• Economies of Scale
• Predictable Pricing

Whether the industry will ever agree on a simple and standard Cloud definition is debatable, but one thing is certain, the benefits of Cloud Computing, of a centralised pool of computing resources that can be easily accessed via the internet , paid for on consumption basis, are just too compelling to ignore. Server virtualisation, storage, ‘play and pay as you go’ web hosting, integrated communications are a sample of the current services that are delivered as cloud offerings and all of them, if utilised properly, will deliver substantial operation and financial savings.

If you require more information about the servers that iomart Hosting offers and manages, then please contact us now.