Cloud computing Essay

In the past a few years, the rapid advances in technology had brought us more challenges in adopting emerging technologies and pedagogies in our teaching and learning environment. As our school is committed to developing, implementing, and maintaining quality education programs, it becomes imperative to utilize updated technology to address the changing demand of students. However, the cost and time to develop the information, software, and resources is too high for us. Facing the high cost of providing computing infrastructure and software by traditional independent software vendors, I have examined the possibility of deploying a private cloud computing system in our school to help cut down our technology expense, and the implementation is feasible. Nowadays, all types of organizations are trending toward cloud computing. It reflects the ability of having access to information, software, and computing resource infrastructure without necessarily having to own them. By deploying cloud computing, it will allow students to personalize their environments in which they learn, help cut down our expense on IT management cost, and provide greater flexibility in maintaining security, reliability and compliance. Overall, the cloud computing can be a strong tool in enhancing our teaching and learning. Please allow me to discuss different aspects of cloud computing: * What is private cloud computing * How to implement private cloud computing system * What are advantages of private cloud computing What is private cloud computing Definition of cloud computing The term â€Å"cloud† implies an idea that users are able to access applications from any location in the world. Cloud computing is defined as a collection of disembodied services accessible from anywhere using any mobile device that has access to the Internet (Mondal 2009). In other words, cloud computing is an application service that is like e-mail and uses ubiquitous resources that can be shared by many students at the same time. To be more specific, in contrast to traditional computing that access data and run through software locally, cloud computing store data in a data center rather than in the client’s computer. Also, instead of installing a suite of software for each computer, cloud computing allows users to load only one web-based application that hosts all the programs the user would need for work (see figure below). Figure: How does cloud computing work Examples of cloud computing For example, someone accesses email through a web-based email service (such as Google’s Gmail) does not need to run an email program or store messages locally. Instead, both the application and the underlying data are hosted in Google’s data center. A similar distinction can be drawn between an end user running a traditional word processing application, such as Microsoft Word, and another end user using a cloud based application, such as Google Docs (Thomas 2011). Concept of private cloud computing In terms of private cloud computing, it refers as internal cloud, which is developed and provided only for a single organization. By having a private cloud, an organization will have a full control over data and security. Besides, a private cloud will provide students and staff with a flexible and agile private infrastructure to run service workloads within the administrative domain (Wang 2011). How to implement private cloud computing system Cloud service provider needed In order to run a private cloud computing system, we need to have a cloud service provider to support the network facilities. Independent software vendors supply the computer and operating system resources that can be accessed via the Internet (Katzan 2010). There are a number of software vendors that provide customized cloud service. Once the operating system of cloud computing is set up, students and faculties will share the software together and achieve significant economy of scale. Potential software vendor: Unisys One software vendor candidate is Unisys, which is a worldwide information technology company. They provide a portfolio of IT services, software, and technology that solve critical problems for clients. Also, they have a competitive advantage in specializing in helping clients secure their operations, increase the efficiency and utilization of their data centers, enhance support to their end users and constituents, and modernize their enterprise applications. In January 2012, Unisys helped California Sate University deploy a private cloud solution to streamline services to students and administrators. What are advantages of private cloud computing Decreased implementation cost Since cloud environment does not reside in a capital facility, there is a substantial saving of the time and space. Also, it provides users access only to the resources they need for a particular task. This prevents them from paying for idle computing resources. Besides, there are competing providers for this service and an organization can always shift its business to another company offering better service or lower price. In terms of statistics, we spend $6,000 per month to update software, maintain our computer lab, and pay our employees. However, implementing a cloud computing with a constructing price of $2800 will incur a cost as low as $249 per month (Hinchcliffe 2009). Increased flexibility With cloud computing, students can get access to learning tools with flexible operating platforms, and many students can obtain the same resources at the same time. Therefore, it encourages students to work collaboratively with their classmates and teachers and share their work with each other without a restriction of location. Also, cloud computing helps create a more open and responsive learning environment for students. User friendly Cloud Computing enables students to access various computing resources simply, including computing cycles, storage space, programming environments and software applications (Dothang 2010). As everything is stored on the Internet, no configuration or backup is needed. All a user needs is only a device and Internet access. Significant workload shift Cloud vendors have vast data centers full of tens of thousands of server computers, offering computing power and storage of a magnitude never available before. In other words, cloud computing promises virtually unlimited resources. Besides, it does not require the business to deal with installation, upgrade, maintenance, and staff training which eliminates a significant amount of workload.