Cloud Computing: Overview & Current Research Challenges

Abstract

Cloud computing is a set of IT services that are provided to a customer over a network on a leased basis and with the ability to scale up or down their service requirements. Usually Cloud Computing services are delivered by a third party provider who owns the infrastructure.Cloud Computing holds the potential to eliminate the requirements for setting up of high-cost computing infrastructure for IT-based solutions and services that theindustry uses. It promises to provide a flexible IT architecture, accessible through internet from lightweight portable devices.This would allow multi-fold increase in the capacity and capabilities of the existing and new software.This new economic model for computing has found fertile ground and is attracting massive global investment. Many industries, such as banking, healthcare and education are moving towards the cloud due to the efficiency of services provided by the pay-per-use pattern based on the resources such as processing power used, transactions carried out, bandwidth consumed, data transferred, or storage space occupied etc.In a cloud computing environment, the entire data resides over a set of networked resources, enabling the data to be accessed through virtual machines. Despite the potential gains achieved from the cloud computing, the organizations are slow in accepting it due to security issues and challenges associated with it. Security is one of the major issues which hamper the growth of cloud. There are various research challenges also there for adopting cloud computing such as well managed service level agreement (SLA), privacy, interoperability and reliability.This research paper presents what cloud computing is, the various cloud models and the overview of the cloud computing architecture. This research paper also analyzes the key research challenges present in cloud computing and offers best practices to service providers as well as enterprises hoping to leverage cloud service to improve their bottom line in this severe economic climate.