CLOUD COMPUTING INTRODUCTION The idea behind cloud computing is to provide services like computation, software, data access

and storage services to users by hiding the effective physical location of the resource providers. [[] As the name suggests, cloud computing is related to the idea of cloud, which was the first representation of telephone networks in the past and is used from then on as a representation of the Internet, to hide the actual number of devices and resources involved in any operation on the Internet. The main feature of cloud computing is the possibility of using several distributed machines, such that to be able to utilize the computational power of several systems. This is particularly important because even if we improve the computational power of the individual systems or we develop good algorithms to solve the problems faster, we will eventually get to the question What if you had 1000 times more data?[[]. This is the point where cloud computing becomes important and using distributed systems is the only way to be able to store and use large amounts of data. The history of cloud computing is difficult to assess. It is most likely that the concept of cloud was first used during the 1990s, with the occurrence of Virtual Private Networks, which offered a lower cost service for the same quality, by introducing circuit switching technique for phone providers of Internet at that time. This is also the point where the cloud was used to represent the entire infrastructure between the provider and the user, thus hiding all these intermediate layers of resources. Cloud computing can be recognized in Application Service Providers (ASPs) in the same period, and, if at the beginning was providing only some utility services, it has evolved to the full power of the concept that we have today, when nearly all large organizations use this kind of cloud services. It is pretty obvious that cloud computing represents the future of Computer Science, due to the expansion of the number of Internet users and to the increased need of computational power and storage capacity. For example, it would be difficult to imagine today the complex simulations performed by scientists in different scientific fields, like physics, meteorology or military without the help of cloud computing. On the other side, the expansion of companies like Google is based on such cloud computing techniques, being estimated today that they use a million servers in order to provide all the services the company offers, such as Gmail, search engine or Google Docs. [[] All of these servers are spread throughout the world, thus providing a fast access to Google services from anywhere and allowing a large number of users to use these services simultaneously. Another good example of what cloud computing means today would be the usage of the search engines of different companies. It allows us to access information from any machine in the world that has access to the Internet and it is able to deliver this information to millions of users simultaneously. 2) Important concepts on cloud computing One of the most important advantages of cloud computing for small and medium businesses is that it provides a low cost for using large resources. Such companies dont usually have the financial resources to develop their own infrastructure for using large data, but they can instead use the capabilities offered by cloud server providers, such as Amazon EC2. This means that they use the large storage facilities for a period of time, rather than

permanently, thus paying a smaller price than needed in case of upgrading their own infrastructure. There are also risks of using cloud computing and these would be the general risks that we encounter when using the Internet itself. Security risks might be higher as computational power and speed of access increase over time, thus the typical risks, like password cracking, malicious data etc. might spread even faster than before. Another possible risk would be data availability in case some of the machines in the cloud become non-functional. It is important how data is stored, used and shared in order to prevent a failure of the service in case of a malfunctioning or even in case of a state seizure of the servers. If we are to talk about large companies, cloud computing helps them to achieve an infinite level of scalability from the users point of view. [[] For example, as already described in the introductory section, a very large number of users can access a service like email, which seems to be an infinite resource from the point of view of the regular user, due to the distributed nature of the email service. In this way, the email can be accessed by millions of users in a day and performance will remain unaltered for each individual. Another important characteristic of cloud computing is given by the fact that the infrastructure is shared. As we all know, there are a lot of computing resources in each company which usually do not work at full capacity. If we are able to connect all these stations and use their full computational and storage power, we would be able to obtain a practically infinite resource environment, capable of solving all the large tasks of a company at a given moment. Moreover, it is possible to get the information on demand for all these services, thus the resources are used only when it is really the case. The higher the demand of users, the higher the resource usage involved in the cloud. This, combined with the general pricing policy (pricing on the amount of time the resources are used) mentioned before prove the advantages provided by cloud computing. As mentioned in [[], we may talk about private/public and internal/external clouds. A private cloud offers access to the cloud to a specific group of users which are granted the access, while a public cloud provides services over the Internet to all users. An internal cloud is a private cloud which is used inside a company or group of companies, while an external cloud may be private or public; the idea is that it provides services to other companies or groups of companies, too. An important concept is the grouping of clouds based on the services they provide to the user. In general, we can talk about three categories: infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) [[].