E-Procurement
Q.12 Carry out web research to find out what is meant by the term ‘Cloud Computing’. Describe in your own words what is meant by this term. Explain in your own words the impact that cloud computing might have in e-commerce. Ensure that you describe potential benefits and problems. Deadline is 6 pm Friday as originally indicated.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is initially a revolution. It is anything that involves delivering hosted services over the internet. The services that are provided are split into 3 categories.
-IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
-PaaS (Platform as a service)
-SaaS (Software as a Service) Cloud computing is closely associated with web 2.0. In particular a key element of both trends is the emergence of online applications known as SaaS
A cloud can be public or private. As a quick overview cloud computing is basically where data and software applications are accessed from a cloud of online resources. This is very useful as it allows individual users to access their data and applications from any device, this then allows businesses to reduce capital costs in their IT infrastructure as the overheads are reduced because they do not need to purchase multiple software and hardware for users. With cloud computing they are able to purchase software and hardware as a utility resource.
So cloud computing allows individuals and organisations to connect to cloud computing resources rather than having to install hardware and software to run on their own hardware.
The impact that cloud computing might have in e-commerce
With cloud computing becoming a great success it is of great benefit to organisations. With the resources being readily available to all sizes of business any company or any body can now connect to software or hardware as an online utility. This means less companies will now have to invest in a large scale computing infrastructure. In addition over the next few years fewer individual users will be tied to a particular device when they want to access their data and applications. This will make e-commerce businesses more profitable. Many companies like Amazon, Google IBM and many more have already embraced the cloud computing revolution. Now Microsoft face a bigger challenge if they still want to produce software that will still run on local hardware. If cloud computing ends up blowing out Microsoft this could be demolishing as Microsoft applications will not be getting produced to develop cloud computing.
