Page 1105 - Cloud computing: From paradigm to operation

Assisting developing countries 8

• resource conservation owing to workforce redundancy;

• absence of wasted capacity, routine server maintenance or daily backup issues;
• data security and protection from denial of service attacks and spam;
• statutory compliance when housing and processing medical or government data;
• guaranteed uptime and SLA; and
• access to the latest licensed software and infrastructure without having to pay for it entirely.

Most CSPs have engaged in cloud service provision in order to provide their customers with an affordable
solution that minimizes their infrastructure investment costs and has faster time to market. At the same time,
the CSPs have been motivated to provide customer on-demand services in order to meet the needs of their
customers who want to access these services at their convenience.

Figure 7-2 – Types of customers subscribing to cloud computing

The target market for most providers is skewed towards providing solutions to small-to-medium sized
enterprises that want to minimize their infrastructure cost or completely outsource the data management
services. Some relatively bigger corporate companies and organizations that include private and government
institutions also use the cloud services motivated by the need to have some cost effective and efficient way
of deployment of IT services.

The services mainly being offered by the CSPs include:
• online customer support;
• data storage through virtual private servers;
• mail hosting;

• communication and collaboration services;
• software as a service relating to business application such as accounting and human resource
management; and

• infrastructure as a service.

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