When it comes to cloud computing and its characteristics, there are five essential characteristics of the cloud environment. Cloud computing is becoming popular worldwide as it offers innumerable advantages to its customers.
It should be first understood that why some of the companies are shifting to cloud environment whereas some are not. The type of cloud computing services which are provided might not be useful for your local business and so shifting to cloud platform can be a bad decision.
As per NIST, there are five essential characteristics of cloud computing which can be easier to understand by dummies and students. We tend to find out 6 characteristics of cloud which can take your business a notch further and will surely change the way online of online business.
Cloud technology seems to be confusing to a non-techie person but reading these common characteristics, you must be clearer with the basic idea of why companies are migrating to cloud.
Characteristics of Cloud Computing
On-demand service
On-demand usage is the ability of a cloud consumer to self-provision and uses all the necessary cloud-based services without requiring cloud provider integration. A cloud consumer can unilaterally access cloud-based IT resources giving the freedom t self-provision IT resources.
Once provisioned, the resources can be automated which requires no further human involvement by the cloud provider or cloud consumer. Thus resulting in the on-demand usage environment. This characteristic of cloud computing enables the service-based and usage-driven features found in mainstream clouds.
You can also add or delete users and change storage networks and software as needed. The charges can be based on monthly subscription or pay-for-what-you-use scenario. This can vary according to each software providers.
This is the most important characteristic of cloud computing which increases the overall functionality and operations.
Resource pooling or Multitenancy
The resources used by cloud providers are pooled to serve multiple customers by using a multi-tenant model having different virtual and physical resources which are dynamically designed according to customer demand.
Multitenancy is the characteristic of the software program which enables an instance of the program to serve different customers or tenants and each customer is isolated from other. A cloud service provider pools its services to multiple consumers by using multitenancy models which frequently rely on the use of virtualization technology. By using this technology, IT resources can be dynamically assigned and redesigned based on the demands of the customer.
A cloud service provider pools its services to multiple consumers by using multitenancy models which frequently rely on the use of virtualization technology. By using this technology, IT resources can be dynamically assigned and redesigned based on the demands of the customer.
Different physical and virtual IT resources are dynamically assigning and reassign the same resources according to the cloud consumer demand. This is executed through statistical multiplexing.
Resource pooling can be done in two ways one is the single-tenant environment and multi-tenant environment. Both are explained in the diagram.
Measured Service
The measured usage characteristic of cloud computing represents the ability of cloud platform to keep all the track of the usage of IT resources, primarily by cloud consumers.
The cloud provider can be evenly charging a cloud consumer for IT resources actually using and for the timeframe during which the IT resources were granted. Measured usage is closely related to on-demand characteristics of cloud services.
Rapid Elasticity
Elasticity is the ability of the cloud to transparently scale IT resources, as required in response to runtime conditions and also as predetermined by the cloud consumer or cloud provider. For example, if any customer needs to increase the size of the server or ask for allocating three more servers at a different location, it is easily done by contacting the service provider.
Elasticity is often considered as a core justification for the adoption of cloud computing, primarily due to fact that it is generally associated with reduced investment and proportional cost benefits. The local business companies with vast IT resources can offer a great range of elasticity.
Ubiquitous Access
This enables cloud provider to be widely available. It can be widely beneficial as establishing ubiquitous access for a cloud service can require support for aa range of devices, interfaces, transport protocols, and security technologies.
Enabling the level of access generally require that cloud service architecture to be tailored to particular needs of different consumers.
Resiliency
Resilient computing is a type of failover that distributes a redundant implementation of IT resources across physical locations. The IT resources can be easily pre-configured so that if any one of them becomes deficient, processing is handled automatically over to another redundant implementation.
The characteristic of resiliency can refer to redundant IT resources within the same cloud environment or across multiple clouds. For more easily understanding, you can see the diagram.