Fall Inside NIRMA Issue

C
loud computing. The emerging world of
harnessing the vastness of the Internet to
access computing power and storage beyond
your imagination. Running a computer model? More
CPU, more RAM! Need to slam through hundreds of
thousands of transactions in a single day? No problem!
Want to store gazillion records ranging in size from 50K
to hundreds of Mbytes? I’ll take a few terabytes, thank
you very much!
You have power of the universe in your very hands!
But enough of the hype…
By Eugene Y. Yang,
Principal Consultant
KISMET Consulting, Inc.
I’ve been asked a lot lately about my take on the use of the cloud for the
storage and management of electronic records pertaining to nuclear plant
operations. I hope this issue’s column provides some clarity.
Haiku on the Cloud
The cloud, the promise
No Infrastructure to keep
Records protection?
So, what’s cloud computing?
Cloud computing is the delivery of on-demand
computing services -- from applications to storage and
processing power -- over the Internet, on a pay-as-yougo
(“subscription”) basis. Cloud computing allows an
organization to lease computer systems and services
from computer service organizations. These
organizations pool resources to serve multiple
customers via the Internet, thus relieving the customers
of buying, supporting, maintaining, and providing
storage equipment and software themselves. Generally,
the offerings consist of following types:
• Infrastructure-as-a- Service (IaaS) - This
type provides infrastructure resources, such as
servers, network, operation systems, and data
storage, from a location(s) where the services are
provided to many clients on usually shared
resources.
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) - This type
provides frameworks that developers can use to
build custom applications and deliver their
applications over the Internet. PaaS provides the
data serving, storage and management resources to
the developer so they do not have to own the
software and hardware and manage the technology.
Like with IaaS, the customer is utilizing those
resources as a service and relying on the PaaS
vendor to maintain the equipment, software
resources, security and technology.
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