A survey on cloud computing

The long-dreamed vision of “computing as a utility” has finally taken shape in the form of cloud computing. This paradigm shift is the biggest buzz in today´s computer world. It can be thought of an evolution of existing technologies rather than a revolution. The basic requirements of cloud are to meet the various needs of enterprise organizations such as scalability, adaptability, extensibility and manageability. The biggest visible change the cloud computing has made in the scenario of computing is moving the data center offsite to a third party and buying services rather than maintaining onsite applications directly. By its use companies can save money on operational costs and they can focus on their core business instead of being worried about different IT obstacles. Moreover true portability is provided by cloud by enabling access to applications and documents anywhere in the world via the internet through commodity hardware only. In this paper we have described the basic concepts of cloud computing in a nutshell so that the readers can get an essence of this newly emerging technology.