The Power of Cloud Computing Explained Cloud Computing based solutions, such as our core offerings, are service and solution orientated.
Now lets put Cloud Computing and its components in context of our offering. SmartLogiq’s core proposition is an integrated business application portfolio served to our customers without the overhead of complex deployment projects and infrastructure investments that our customers usually face when they introduce a new application into their enterprise.
We deliver on-demand smart success using scalable software and hardware platforms with resilience built-in. Our SmartLogiq portfolio of applications deliver strategic advantage to our customers, provides smart analytics, and meets the needs of ‘big’ data management.
Companies and government departments are looking for solutions, not just capabilities. Capabilities are isolated components of achievements, whereas solutions are a combination of capabilities, expertise and infrastructure smartly put together to reach a solution that solves many business problems with an expected Return on Investment (RoI).
The term Cloud Computing, in its basic interpretation, is a collection of computer systems connected by a network, often across multiple sites, running programs in a distributed formation to ensure high availability and scalability with specific levels of service (SLA) and quality of service (QoS).
The term “high availability” is the objective of ensuring the system or service being provided is available 24/7/365 and to achieve this objective the Cloud Computing platform is made of many similar nodes doing a similar function and hidden behind network devices called load balancers which load balance requests across these similar devices based on the number of requests, response rate and device status (whether available or downed or taken off-line for maintenance).
The term “scalability” refers to the automated or real time orchestration of compute resources that drives the Cloud. Many Cloud infrastructure or platform providers offer the capability of automatically increasing or decreasing the number of nodes that service the solution, so that when there is a spike or trough in number of users or processing demand, the Cloud platform increases or decreases the resources respectively to compliment the usage requirements.
Cloud Computing abstracts the technology platform and its management from the services it provides, thus allowing the Cloud based solution provider to focus on the core service being offered without the management overhead required to control the infrastructure behind it.
Cloud Computing offers a better return on investment, agility and adaptability to the needs at the time, reduces up front capital expenditure and improves efficiency in service or solution delivery.
Cloud Computing enables organisations to position the technology provision as an operational expense (OPEX) rather than capital expense (CAPEX).
Cloud Computing reduces the environmental footprint of technology by its nature of sharing computing cycles across many businesses in an efficient way thus reducing the carbon footprint and negative emissions into the atmosphere. Due to its automated scalability, it lends itself to quicker time to market for the provision solutions or resource requirements.
There are many types of Cloud Computing, more accurately there are specific layers of Cloud Computing that represent traditional computing layers. There is Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and they are all distinctly different in their proposition.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), the core and the lowest layer of Cloud computing, and the most fundamental layer of Cloud computing.
This layer focuses on the core technology building blocks that allows automated orchestration of servers, operating systems and network topology. IaaS abstracts the physical hardware, virtualises it and provides automation tools to create, delete and scale (e.g. increase RAM, CPU and disk space of servers) the IaaS component as per the real time requirement of the solution provider.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), the next layer of Cloud Computing, focuses on the infrastructure software that takes this technology offering to the next level.
The PaaS providers offer IaaS with specific platform software such as SQL database servers (e.g. Oracle, MS SQL, MySQL), web servers, mail services (e.g. POP3, IMAP), interpreters such as PHP and Python and Java application virtual machines.
The user of PaaS does not concern themselves with the provisioning or orchestration of CPU, RAM and disk aspects but actually concentrates on the number of nodes of each infrastructure software and its capabilities by distributing the compute and processing requirements across service nodes.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), is the top layer of Cloud Computing, which focuses on the end result which the end-users actually interact with. Google mail is the most common example of SaaS, which offers a mail service that the user interacts with through a browser.
The Google mail SaaS platform for example, relies on the PaaS provided web servers, database servers, mail servers (e.g. POP3 and IMAP) and application layer (the IP of Google) whilst all these services rely upon the IaaS capabilities of processing and compute nodes and the related RAM, CPU and storage needed to deliver the solution.
SmartLogiq’s core offerings are Cloud Computing based solutions delivered using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model thus ensuring scalability, reliability and allows us to focus on the user and business functionality and its security without necessarily having our own physical infrastructure to be concerned about.
Therefore, putting SmartLogiq in context of Cloud Computing, we are using Cloud Computing based IaaS and Paas to deliver our SaaS solution to our user community.