Cloud computing - concepts, architecture and challenges

With the advent internet in the 1990s to the present day facilities of ubiquitous computing, the internet has changed the computing world in a drastic way. It has traveled from the concept of parallel computing to distributed computing to grid computing and recently to cloud computing. Although the idea of cloud computing has been around for quite some time, it is an emerging field of computer science. Cloud computing can be defined as a computing environment where computing needs by one party can be outsourced to another party and when need be arise to use the computing power or resources like database or emails, they can access them via internet. Cloud computing is a recent trend in IT that moves computing and data away from desktop and portable PCs into large data centers. The main advantage of cloud computing is that customers do not have to pay for infrastructure, its installation, required man power to handle such infrastructure and maintenance. In this paper we will discuss what makes all this possible, what is the architectural design of cloud computing and its applications.