Cloud Computing Services Research Papers Example

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Cloud Computing Vendors
On the row of cloud computing services competition, among the top racers include Microsoft, IBM, Amazon and Rackspace. One of the top electronic commerce firms in the United States, Amazon.com commenced its business as an online shop for books, downloading flowing videos (DVDs, CDS, MP3s, etc.), jewelry, toys, food, furniture and apparel. This one stop shop eventually extends its product line to shopper electronics including tablets, phone and TV (Fire) and electronic book readers. Started in 1995, Amazon has been offering its online services to clients from Germany, Canada, United States, Ireland, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, Mexico and countries from Asia . Meanwhile, stationed in Washington, United States, Microsoft Corporation manufactures consumer electronics, computer software and services and personal computers. It expanded its product line including the famous Xbox games, tablets and software products such as Microsoft operating systems, Internet Explorer and Office Suites. The firm has acquired customers in almost every country in the world and continuous to expand its business through its purchase of the devices from Nokia and its licenses . International Business Machine (IBM) launched its business as early as 1911. Already serving 170 countries, IBM pioneers in both retail as well as consulting services with its headquarter in New York, United States. It has currently at least 435,000 staffs worldwide and maintaining its research and development laboratories in 12 countries as of 2013. Among its inventions and products include the automated teller machine (ATM), magnetic cards, databases, disk drives and other operational systems for airline reservation and artificial intelligence. It expanded its operation when it acquires SPSS and Kenexa as well as Price Waterhouse Cooper as part of its consulting arena . Rackspace, a cloud computing company that started in 1998, operates in various countries such as Australia, United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Hong Kong and in the United States. The firm pioneered through its product line including dedicated servers and cloud servers and expanded through its acquisition of cloud storage provider, Slice Host, as well as consulting firm of Microsoft named SharePoint911, ZeroVM, Cloudkick and Object Rocket .
Amazon’s Amazon Web services cater a broad cloud computing environment for application, storage, computing, analytics and deployment. It provides low cost for information technology for faster scale applications and manages a huge range of workloads that include data processing, archiving, mobile and web applications. This company offers a web hosting service free trials, AWS Free Tier, without charge for 12 months to get the feel of how to use AWS once signed up. This entails free 750 hours micro instance (either Microsoft Windows or Linux), 750 hours with free 15GB load balancing and 30GB block storage. Amazon also offers business email service that can combine with a company’s server that is free of charge during its first year of trial. IBM, on the other hand, offers web hosting services in the cloud that includes collaboration tool, email and calendar, web meetings, mobile apps and document editors. This hosting also offers 1TB storage of files, 50GB storage for communities as well as 50GB storage for mailbox. It offers a one month trial period and cost USD$10 per user per month or USD$30 quarterly. Microsoft’s web hosting service, Azure, offers a free one monthly trial and costs at least $200 to avail of web hosting services, database, active directory, mobile push and media streaming. Rackspace offers a pay-as-you-go web hosting infrastructure that starts at 2GB RAM, 2 CPUs, 40GB system disk 400Mb/s at $0.44 per hour raw infrastructure. With this set-up, clients can also pay an additional $0.10 per hour for infrastructure management. The firm also offers a hosted email exchange at $10 per mailbox per month.

Assumptions and Recommendations

With the assumption that our company has the basic infrastructures and servers where it can handle virtual machine set-up from headquarter to our satellite offices, I will most likely explore the possibility of implementing Amazon web services within the company. Amazon, being a reputable company, offers a free trial of 1-year for web hosting, its application development platform and email services. Our company can take advantage exploring this free trial and implement our required services in the cloud. This decision also assumes that the needed skills for web development and enhancement and required knowledge for cloud computing environment is in place. While we test the AWS service, we can anticipate whether the basic needs that we have for our IT infrastructure already suffices our need. In the middle of implementation and deployment, we can already anticipate the load that our web requires, email storage and backups that we need and upgrade with regard to the free application platform that we avail. From here on, our company can also foresee the possible minimum investment that we need to maintain and sustain the initial set-up. We can also foresee whether we need to increase the needed human skills in order to continuously sustain the implementation at minimal cost.

Works Cited

Hutchins, G. The Nature of Business: Redesigning for Resilience. United Kingdom: Green Books, Ltd., 2012. Book.
Microsoft Corporation. "Microsoft Corporation Annual Reports." Annual Report. 2014. Document.
Staflefoot, L. "Building Your Ecommerce Strategy." 2014. Web.
Walters, E. The Essential Guide to Computing: The Story of Information Technology. New York: Prentice Hall, 2001. Book.