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Unit 5: Cloud Computing for the Community

issue of Convenience vs. Control. Cloud computing is advantageous as you don’t need to worry Notes
about software installation or maintenance, you can also access your files from anywhere. But
we cannot ignore the flaws of cloud computing which invites the virus threats. We realty
depend on technology for all our work, sometimes without even knowing it. Letting the easy
convenience of having Amazon look after our ebooks, Apple our music collections, Google
with pretty much the rest of our lives. A recent example is Adobe making their software
subscription only. The downside of systems built around convenience is that when they go
wrong, they are pretty difficult to fix. They aren’t designed for the user to fix them and often
these companies aren’t able to cope, either.

Example: Google Apps for in-house email provides higher uptime, but its failure
highlights the issue of lock-in. This issue comes from depending on vendor Clouds.
The even greater concern is the loss of information privacy, with vendors having full access to
the resources stored on their Clouds.
This same issue of privacy and confidentiality of information stored forced the British Government
to consider a ‘G Cloud’ for Government Business Applications. G-Cloud is the UK government’s
framework for introducing cloud-based ICT services into government IT departments and
streamlining IT procurement across, eventually, the entire group of public sector organisations.
As part of the program, the government introduced the cloud store, a digital marketplace for
cloud services.
In particularly sensitive cases of SMEs and start-ups, the provider-consumer relationship that
Cloud Computing fosters between the owners of resources and their users could potentially be
detrimental, as there is a potential conflict of interest for the providers. They profit by providing
resources to up-and-coming players, but also wish to maintain dominant positions in their
consumer facing industries.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. .......................... gives you an opportunity to access your business information from
anywhere in the world at any time.
2. ........................................... is a provision model in which an organization outsources the
equipment used to support operations.

3. Platform as a Service (PaaS) is an outgrowth of ................................. a software distribution
model in which hosted software applications are made available to customers over the
Internet.
4. ............................... is the UK government’s framework for introducing cloud-based ICT
services into government IT departments.

5.2 Community Cloud

A community cloud in computing is a collaborative effort in which infrastructure is shared
between several organizations from a specific community with common concerns of security,
compliance, jurisdiction, etc. whether managed internally or by a third-party and hosted internally
or externally. The costs are spread over fewer users than a public cloud so only some of the cost
savings potential of cloud computing are realized.

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