Cloud Computing, Cloud Services and Hosting Services

Cloud-Based Services and solutions have recently become one of the most talked about technology topics in both the business and consumer world. Did you know that we, at Carisma, have been proving cloud services for over a decade?

But, what is the cloud and what does it mean to me?

Really, cloud services and cloud computing are two different things. We can help you with both.

Cloud services, in the most general sense, is a variation of an old business called "hosting". What the cloud really means, is that you do not have to own or lease any major server or file storage equipment, you can rely on those items from a third party (and typically just pay a monthly fee). The idea is, you save on capital investments because you don't need to buy server, you save on physical floor space, since someone else runs your servers, you save on electricity, and you save on labor as you don't need an in-house "I.T. guy". You also don't have to worry about growth, as you can just lease more space or bandwidth as necessary. All you really need is a good internet connection from wherever you intend to work from, as you are accessing your important work and files "off of the cloud". Carisma offers cloud hosting services for file storage, applications, websites and email.

Cloud computing is similar but different than cloud services. Again, you want all the power of having lots of equipment, but don't really have the capital to make it happen. Easy, you rely on the combined processing power of other computers and servers to handle your intensive applications and demanding websites. Cloud computing is on-demand, meaning when a load increases (such as a high demand on your website during a sale) that the application can distribute the load across multiple processors, memory, or even entire computers. Carisma can help with cloud computing by introducing you to virtualization technologies such as VMWare and Amazon S3.

Website, Application and Email Hosting: "The Cloud"