A Brief Survey of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is among the most promising technologies of the recent days, with the potential to reach $204 billion by the end of 2016. Almost all major tech companies provide cloud services of one sort or another like computing clusters and cloud storage. Cloud services can be provisioned as Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and they can be deployed as private, community, public or hybrid clouds. Cloud computing provides several advantages like ease-of-deployment, no maintenance and up-front costs, and rapid and efficient scalability. But it does pose several challenges with regards to security of data and privacy issues, and many security sensitive companies tend to shy away from cloud services due to this very reason