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Considering the enormous pressures on the IT budgets in the present day’s competitive environment, companies are looking for IT solutions that can be flexibly scaled up or down depending upon the business needs. You can consider Cloud computing or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for such requirements as an attractive alternative proposition. One such example of such a service is the IBM’s Computing on Demand (CoD) which provides a variety of choices and pricing options. CoD also enables security, affordability, flexibility and virtually risk free access to IT infrastructure resources.

Customers across a number of industries are interviewed by IBM. For a model set up using IBM CoD, TCO savings vary from 30% to 90%. Additionally, three specific IBM CoD customers mentioned at length in the case studies, have the advantages of:

1. New potential to solve a preexisting, obstinate issue.
2. faster processing of data at the end of each business day, and,
3. The skill to apply a fresh, original business model.

Cloud computing, covering hardware, software and applications, is the emerging trend for providing transparent services over the internet in a dynamic, expandable and virtual manner. One need not have prior knowledge or expertise in technology infrastructure to take advantage of this new technology. It encompasses the recent trends in internet technology like software as a service (Saas), Web 2.0 etc. Modern concepts in IT infrastructure solutions like grid computing, utility computing and autonomic computing are utilized in Cloud computing. For smaller companies like an independent software vendor (ISV) or small internet companies, cloud computing helps save large capital outlays in hardware, software and skilled manpower thus providing enormous savings.

The concept of Software as a Service (SaaS) can be confusing, not least because different vendors, users, and commentators will describe SaaS products with many different terms. These include cloud computing, ASP, hosted services, services on demand, software plus service, multi-tenant applications, and utility computing, in addition to SaaS. These terms in fact have slightly different meanings, and the differences are quite significant. Therefore, it makes sense to clearly delineate the definition of each of these terms, so that users will know exactly which services they require.

Software as a Service : Software as a Service (SaaS), a model of software distribution in which applications are licensed to clients as a service on demand by providers, is just as much a business model as it is a technology. By definition, SaaS is typically associated by business associates and professionals with business software. It is typically held as a low-cost method for businesses to secure software rights as needed versus licensing every device with all applications. This on demand licensing allows the benefits of commercially licensed utilization without the associated complexity and possibly large cost of providing all devices with applications only used when needed. SaaS vendors may either host this application on their own servers, or download the application to a consumer device, then disabling it after finished using it, or after the on-demand contract expires.

Multi-tenancy: Multi-tenancy is an architectural software principle where the software runs on a software-as-a-service (Saas) vendor’s servers, while serving multiple client organizations, or tenants. Multi-tenancy allows many clients to co-exist securely on one infrastructure. SaaS’s applications architecture and design are built specifically with a "multi-tenant’ backend, which enables access by several customers or users to a shared data model, differentiating SaaS from client/server of ‘ASP’ (Application Service Provider) solutions. This is because Saas providers influence massive economies of scale in support, deployment, and management.

Application Service Provider: A business providing computer-based services to clients over a network is known as an Application Service Provider (ASP). In general, most applications supported by ASP were massive client-server programs with basic HTML Web interfaces. An ASP placed programs of your choice on their site’s server, but might not have possessed multi-tenant capability. The ASP model concentrates on providing organizations with the capacity to move specific application processing tasks to a server managed by a third party. Most ASPs did not consist of enough application and business domain expertise concerning applications they run.

“Hosted” : Hosted is an ambiguous term either meaning SaaS or ASP. A Hosted Service Provider (xSP) is a business bearing a combination of conventional IT functions such as Web development, infrastructure, email, applications (Software as a Service), monitoring, security, storage, and website hosting, over the Internet of other wide area networks (WANs). An xSP fuses the abilities of an Internet service provider (ISP) and an application service provider (ASP).

“On-Demand”: This software is not conventionally purchased but is rented as per the user’s requirements. It may or may not be hosted on a remote server and can also be multi-tenanted. On-Demand Computing is also called Utility Computing, wherein the grouping of computing and storage capabilities is utilized on a pay-as-you-use basis (just like water, gas, electricity or telephone utilities)

Software plus Services : The term "Software plus Services" is used to describe the idea of using locally running applications and hosted services in tandem, to get the greatest benefits from both architectures. Combined applications are generated by using remote services and traditional software installations. The resulting applications should allow users to employ the software from any device in any form that they need. The Software plus Services model allows for Software as a Service (SaaS) to be added to regular software suites running on servers and clients. This will allow a software vendor to benefit from the developing model of cloud computing while still employing the more traditional model of individual software installations, so that users can run their applications from any PC or any device that they have available.

Cloud Computing: The cloud computing model involves rapidly scalable computer resources provided to clients as a service through the World Wide Web. These resources are often virtualized. Users of the cloud do not need to control the technological infrastructure or know how it operates. There are three basic concepts that are usually part of cloud computing architecture, namely infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and platform as a service (PaaS)

IDC, an IT analysis company, has just concluded that they expect the number of companies using cloud computing to double within three years. About 15 to 25 percent of businesses surveyed use cloud computing now, and 25 to 45 percent say that they expect to begin using cloud computing applications no more than three years from now.

Even the US government may soon start using cloud computing. A Request for Quotations has been issued by the General Services Administration , which will establish service guidelines for vendors who want to supply the federal government with cloud computing systems.

Google claims that their data centers will be about twice as energy-efficient as any data center that you can operate on your own. Google recycles the water used to keep their components cool, for added efficiency to reduce their environmental footprint. Their data centers are not the only ones working to increase efficiency; Microsoft’s data centers have also made great strides recently. Cloud computing is generally healthier for the environment than other approaches, due to economies of scale.

Cloud computing means you can keep your data in web applications and contact it from any browser, everywhere – but that doesn’t mean you don’t require a backup plan to protect your data when a storm’s a-brewing in the cloud with these tools. Depending on an outside service to host, update, and preserve the software you love and the data you require is both the cloud’s benefit and inconvenience: you’re putting your things on computers you don’t manage at a single point of access (or failure). Companies get shut down or bought, accounts get protected up, servers (and you) go offline. If you store your email, photos, documents, contacts, bookmarks, and journal entries in the cloud, there are easy ways to back up all that information from popular online services to your computer.

 You most important cloud data is probably in your email account based at Yahoo, Windows Live, Gmail, or some other service.  If your webmail uses POP, then downloading messages is all you have to do to properly back them up.  You can make this process automatic with fetchmail for your Gmail account, if you’re comfortable using the command line. Otherwise, Thunderbird (which uses mbox files) or other desktop clients will download your messages;  just remember to use these clients every few weeks.

The popular photo-sharing service Flickr is used by people who want to upload photos from their hard drive or cell phone to the web site for safe keeping.  If a user’s hard drive crashes and they want to restore their photos from the service there are utilities in place that will help them do so.  FlickrTouchr script is one of these utilities.  It downloads the photos in a Flickr account in their original size and saves them to folders based on the set names. FlickrEdit app is another such utility which is a Java-based free application that can back up a user’s photos, contacts’ photos, or any subset of photos depending on what is chosen.

If documents, spreadsheets, and presentations are piling up in a Google Docs account and need to be backed up, use Windows-only GDoc Backup.  It is a free utility that exports all documents from the desktop at once by downloading only the documents that do not exist on the computer or have an older date.  Mac and Linux users can use GDataCopier instead.

  Many tweets are just fly-by-night thoughts that cross people’s minds so there’s no need to save them.  Others, however, need to be backed up because you want to have access to them later.  This is especially true if you’re getting close to the 3,200 tweets allowed for each account by Twitter on its website.  You can store tweets in a variety of ways:  downloading the tweet XML via cURL, for instance, or using the Backup My Tweets web application.  In the latter case, you first have to tweet about Backup My Tweets.  Then you get a free trial and can download tweets in HTML, PDF, or JSON format. 

There are not many Facebook backup suites, when compared to the number of facilities for Twitter. Social Safe is one of the few good ones, an Adobe AIR application that charges $3 to back up your Facebook profile, photos, list of friends, and photos tagged with your name.  On the other hand, Social Safe won’t back up your comments, wall posts, or status stream;  you should expect more from a paid service.

These days people are putting extensive time and effort into their blogs only to be side railed by server outage, database blow-ups, and host lockouts which erase a user’s posts.  The best methods of backing up a blog will always depend on the service that is used.  Tumbler users should of course have tumble-log backup utility, while WordPress users should have the WP-DB-Backup plug-in which emails or saves regular backups to your blog’s database.  It is also recommend backing up your web server with rsync and a regular mysqldump command.  If the user is hosted on Blogger or another service, they should use a web site copying utility to spider the pages and save them as HTML on their computer.  It is also possible to mirror an entire web site to a hard drive using the command line tool wget and to backup bookmarks using cURL.  For more how-to information for your Mac or PC, check out How Do I Back Up My Blog? at Lifehacker.

Make sure that your company does not lose a part of $45.5BN Market. The latest technological innovation in the field of web technology – cloud computing – is expanding at a fast pace. It has gathered even more momentum after confirmation of takeover of SpringSource by VMWare last week. The market of Cloud Computing which can be defined in a nutshell as "Outsourced Virtualization" is most likely to reach a volume of $45.5 billion by the year 2015. This forecast has been made by a research conducted by Telecom Trends International recently. Entire scenario gets changed with introduction of new technologies and cloud computing and virtualization are two such newly added powerful technological additions having significant potential. The widespread use and popularity of these two new technologies are making it a compulsion for those who are to decide the matter of Enterprise IT to consider these two alternatives sincerely.