Cloud Computing and Offshore Software Solutions

The growth in technology and the need to get information and service has sparked a new revolution in the field of IT services delivery. Attempts have been made to remove any dependency on a particular hardware for hosting any application, services, or resources for sharing. In fact the key issue is to develop an on-demand model wherein the computing power is no more restricted to a single hardware. It will be distributed across multiple hardware functioning as a consolidated unit for providing the required environment for application development or services sharing.

Cloud computing, which refers to this new wave in information and service sharing, is not a new technology all together. It is just a different mechanism of providing services and information to the end user over internet. The cloud here corresponds to the collection of computers which function as a single powerful system, whose combined computing power can be used to execute multiple applications. This frees software development company from the dependency on any specific hardware resources and provides a much flexible model wherein based on requirement the resources are made available from the cloud. Cloud computing provides three modes of information or resource sharing for offshore software development
Software as a Service (SaaS) Model: - In this model, instead of the need to download and install application on your computer or a specific hardware for use, the cloud is used for any application or hardware use. All you need to do is to connect to the cloud and start using these applications and pay only for the duration you have utilized the services.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) Model: - This model provides a mechanism to share a compute infrastructure for service development. This might include sharing of tools, applications, database services etc required for building a complete application. So you no longer required to buy, maintain, or manage the underlying software and hardware components

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Model: - This model shares the complete infrastructure for development of business solutions. This might include servers, network devices, and storage mediums. It works on the concept of virtualization wherein you have the flexibility to choose the configuration of the hardware on which you want to execute your applications.

The three models tend to bring out the great advantages that cloud computing has brought in. One of the biggest advantages of this model is the on-demand model wherein the resources are procured on need basis and are charged accordingly. You do not need to have a complete resource set before any development or service usage. The maintenance and support related expenditure on the resources, had they been purchased locally, has now shifted to the cloud thereby freeing up additional resources and thus reducing the development costs too. Moreover the architecture has become more and more scalable with on-demand usage flexibility making it possible for software development company India reap benefits of the new technological advancements.