The emergence of cloud computing provides benefits of the utility service model to the computing users. Users of computing are now being called subscribers or consumers as they move towards cloud computing. Cloud computing is delivered to its subscribers over the internetwork as well as Internet. Subscribers can access the computing facility on subscription basis, anytime and anywhere.
The scores of benefits of cloud computing are attracting users towards it. But any new innovation comes with few challenges and cloud computing is not an exception. This chapter discusses various benefits of cloud computing and also presents the challenges before it.
The biggest challenge is related to data security and compliance issue. Most of the other critical challenges are due to the absence of open standards where vendors develop clouds using their own proprietary standard or technology. The good aspect is that, significant efforts have been undertaken to resolve all of these issues. Apart from these, this chapter briefly presents the role of web services in cloud computing development.
ORIGIN OF THE TERM ‘CLOUD COMPUTING’
The origin of the term ‘cloud computing’ dates back to the early 1990s. In those early days of network design, network engineers used to draw network diagrams representing different devices and connections among them. In such diagrams, they used to represent outer network arenas with cloud symbol since those details were not in their knowledge. This was known as ‘network cloud’ or ‘cloud’ in the networking industry during that period, but today we do not mean ‘cloud computing’ in the same sense.
With the beginning of utility computing initiatives towards the end of the last century, major software firms focussed on deliver applications over the Internet. Email services gained pace during this period as the vendors started to offer the facility to their users. And the most remarkable initiative came from Salesforce.com when they delivered business application for enterprises over the Internet in 1999. But all of these efforts were seen as part of utility computing facility development. Cloud computing did not emerge till then.
The term ‘cloud computing’ appeared in the market with its present meaning in the year 2006.
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