Journal of Internet Services and Applications
While there are lots of free cloud options for individual users -- quite useful for things like e-mail and document and photo storage -- most of them start to charge you monthly or annual fees when you want to store more than a few gigabytes' worth of data. Hitting a storage wall is a lot worse when you are uploading time-sensitive customer data than when you are saving your dog photos. With SaaS, you are simply accessing software over the Internet that is offered and maintained entirely by the cloud provider. The latter two would definitely put a damper on your cloud upload and retrieval capabilities. Cloud Computing for Dummies. Many businesses are using the cloud to handle some or all of their information technology needs as a more inexpensive, efficient and flexible alternative to purchasing, running and maintaining in-house computing equipment and software. Amazon, an early pioneer in the cloud service area, has had several highly publicized outages from 2011 to 2013. Some of them took down or impaired well-known sites including Reddit, Netflix, Coursera, Foursquare, Instagram, Pinterest, Flipboard, Vine and even Amazon itself. For a person at home trying to watch a movie on Netflix, outages can be an annoyance.
Three common categories are Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). McKay, Dimitri. "The Three Categories of Cloud Computing: What's Your Flavor?" Security Week. And some cloud setups will scale automatically as your usage changes. The ability to ramp up service quickly and pay only for what you use or think you will use are big advantages. It also impacts things like security, which, as you will see next, can affect your ability to work with your data. Of course, the error message saying you have run out of space is likely to be accompanied by instructions on how you can purchase more. They have been attributed to thunder storms, power outages, human error and even a glitch in a single networking device in one case. Gone are the days of being tethered to a single device. Are my files really safe if I store them in the cloud? The cloud is incredibly useful when it works, and most of the time it does -- but it's always good to have a backup plan. You don't have direct access to the backend servers, but you have more control over what you can do on them.
Things like firewalls, encryption, backups, isolation of resources, the strength of authorization at user interfaces and screening of employees and other customers can determine who can get to your resources, how they can do so and what they can do with them. And which type of service your company is using may determine things like who you contact when you have a problem -- someone in your own IT department versus a third party. But for a business, even short disruptions can have a major impact on revenue. Things happen, even to the big players. Your provider might charge you per-gigabyte fees for whatever amount you go over the limit, throttle your bandwidth speed (i.e. slow down your connection) or even cut off your service. Spangler, Todd. "Sony 4K TV Internet Video Service Will Bump Into Bandwidth Caps." Variety. Microsoft's Windows Azure service had an approximately 10-hour disruption in February 2012 caused by a leap day-related software bug.
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