Almost everyone has been talking about Cloud Computing. Not everyone have heard this terminology before. But for web geeks cloud computing is the “next- gen computing”. Basically, cloud computing involves hosted services over the Internet. The services are categorised as infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The cloud symbol that often represents the Internet in diagrams and flowcharts is the inspiration behind its name. A Cloud may be private or public. Private cloud is a proprietary network or data center that provides hosting services only to limited number of people. While Public Cloud provides hosting services to the public. Whether it is a private or public cloud, they both aim to provide easy and scalable access to computing resources and IT services.
Infrastructure-as- a- Service provides virtual server instances with unique IP addresses that blocks storage on demand. These virtual servers uses application program interface or API to configure and manage the virtual server or storage. Amazon Web Services uses IaaS. Platform-as-a- Service in the cloud are set of software and product development tools hosted on the infrastructure of the provider. Developers create applications on the provider’s platform over the Internet. PaaS providers use Web Portals, Gateways or APIs to their customer’s computers. Google Apps is one of the example that uses PaaS. In the Software-as-a- Service cloud, the vendor will provide the hardware infrastructure, the software product and interaction with the user is done through a front-end portal. Services can be anything from database processing, Web- based email to inventory control. The end- user can freely use the service anywhere because both data and application are hosted by the service provider.
Shared, multi-tenant infrastructure, virtualised and dynamic, scalable and available, abstracted from infrastructure, higher-level service and Pay-as-you-go facility are some of the benefits that cloud computing can offer. But its primary benefit is to eliminate the expenditure of the customer on hardware equipment and software tools.
Often, cloud computing is being thought as a data storage not a web development. A lot of institutions or companies are already using cloud computing and this has become a solution for their data storage issues. But as it turned out Google has security issues on such technology in keeping the data secured. Cloud computing opens the possibility of hacking of websites and data. In this sense, data are vulnerable. And if you will be creating a website in the cloud there is a possibility that hackers may sneak into your CMS system and may manipulate or do some changes in your website. Remember that unsecured servers are not good for search engine optimisation and your website.
Having an access to your your server, hackers may manipulate you search engine strategies and can seriously harm your rankings as well as your traffic. Malicious malware downloads and link dropping are just a couple of harmful activities that hackers can do to harm your website. Cloud computing offers great benefits but the lack of security in the cloud is no good for search engine optimisation. And this can put your search engine optimisation efforts at no good.
