At its heart, cloud computing is not something new, concept of cloud computing (also known as Application Service Provider or Elastic Computing) has been adopted by organizations such as Google, American Airline, Yahoo, Amazon and others since mid 1990s. After more than a decade of refining the Internet as a marketplace, the business world is grappling with the uneasy reality that companies can run almost every information system they rely on without owning any tech equipment.

Cloud computing promises to deliver highly reliable, highly elastic services that respond quickly and smoothly to changing user demand. Business can now acquire access to applications and IT infrastructure that reside on the Internet (public cloud) or Intranet (Private Cloud), pay for them on a subscription or per-use basis and provide employees with access to information from anywhere at any time with nothing more than a connected device

There are many concepts that seem similar to cloud computing but are, in fact, complementary to it. If we examine a few of them, we can establish how these concepts build on one another rather than just being alternative names for the same phenomenon.

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): The capability provided to the user to provision processing, storage, networks and other fundamental computing resources upon which the user is able to deploy and run software, which can include operating systems and applications. IaaS may consist of two versions:

2. Physical Infrastructure-as-a-Service (P-IaaS): The foundational physical infrastructure elements such as physical compute, I/O, networking, load balancing, storage and availability (High Availability [HA]/Disaster Recovery [DR]) facilities.

3. Virtual Infrastructure-as-a-Service (V-Iaas): The virtual server management, virtual networking, and other virtualization-based components. As mentioned above, cloud architectures may not necessarily use V-IaaS .

4. Software Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): The capability provided to the user to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure user-created or acquired applications created using programming languages and tools supported by the provider. The user does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure
including network, servers, operating systems or storage, but has control over the deployed applications and, possibly, application-hosting environment configurations. For example, this may consist of generic software platforms such as databases, application servers, etc. which run either natively (on the P-IaaS) or virtually (on the V-IaaS).

5. Application Components-as-a-Service (A-CaaS): The ‘personalized’ PaaS components which could then be integrated by the user into higher-level applications in the SaaS layer.

6. Software-as-a-Service / Web-based Services: (SaaS): The capability provided to the user to access the provider’s applications running on a cloud infrastructure. The applications are accessible from various client devices through a thin client-interface such as a web browser (e.g., web-based email). The user does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, storage or even individual application capabilities, with the possible exception of limited user-specific application configuration settings.

Windows Azure™ is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the internet through Microsoft® datacenters.
Windows Azure is a flexible platform that supports multiple languages and integrates with your existing on-premises environment. To build applications and services on Windows Azure, developers can use their existing Microsoft Visual Studio® expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP.

MDX Technologies can provide cloud solutions in all above mentioned areas however our premier solution is based on VMWARE and Microsoft Azure Platform. Please contact us for more details and a face to face meeting/demo on cloud computing.