Overview
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet). The planning for IT infrastructure has always been a challenge for any organization due to increasingly incrementing demand for resources. Even when an organization plans for it well in advance, optimization of Infrastructure is not easy. Companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft saw these issues as an opportunity, and thus, Cloud Computing originated.

Cloud Computing is a model for enabling on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources—networks, servers, storage, applications, and services—that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

KB has been an early adopter of newer technologies and Cloud Computing is no different. KB has deep expertise in SOA and SaaS, and this has helped us in adopting Cloud Computing seamlessly leveraging Cloud Computing service models to our customers’ advantage.
 

Cloud Challenges

Along with the rich pool of advantages that any new technology offers, many challenges accompany. Cloud Computing poses challenges from the perspective of both application developers and users.
 

KB has developed a deep understanding of these challenges and can, thereby, help its customers deal with these challenges in the best possible way to suit their business scenario.

Solution Offerings

Migrating Existing Enterprise Applications / Applications/Services to Cloud architecture
Most organizations have already invested a lot of money in building applications to automate their business processes. It would have been an expensive effort to reengineer these existing applications to various cloud platforms. However, as a prudent business requirement, cloud platforms offer various tools for migrating existing applications and services to cloud with minimum cost and effort. KB has pioneered in helping its customers by reusing most of their existing applications and services and migrating them to cloud platforms, manually and with the help of tools.

Building Cloud-based Applications/Services
One of the key aspects of cloud computing/platform is to provide enormous scalability; however, appropriate design considerations need to be taken to make it a reality. KB has been evolving and following best practices to make sure that the applications and services built by us use the cloud platforms optimally. KB has gained extensive experience making applications and even more on SOA services on various cloud platforms. KB has implemented a few tools to make development for cloud databases easy.

Creating Private Cloud
Very large organizations are looking at consolidating their internal investments by building a private cloud fabric or infrastructure on top of their existing resources in various datacenters. Working with various customers in the private cloud space has enabled KB to gain vast experience in building such a fabric.

Integrating with Cloud-based Services
Organizations are trying to acquire off-the-shelf services from the market for their non-core business functions to reduce or share the cost for such business scenarios and applications. However, integration with core business functions and applications becomes a critical task in successfully running business. KB has been involved in various EAI/SOA initiatives to make such integration successful for many of our customers.

Cloud-based Applications
KB has started moving some of our internal applications to Azure as well as Amazon platforms to manage our infrastructure efficiently. KB has built required applications and tools for integration and single sign-on between Intranet-based and cloud-based applications. KB is also helping some customers in hosting their solutions on cloud platforms such as Amazon, Google App Engine, Force.com, and Azure.

Cloud Service Models

Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS)

The consumer is provided the capability to use the provider’s applications running on a cloud infrastructure. The applications are accessible from various client devices through a thin client interface such as a web browser (for example, web-based email). The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure that includes network, servers, operating systems, storage, or even individual application capabilities, with the possible exception of limited user-specific application configuration settings.

Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS)

The consumer is provided the capability to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using programming languages and tools supported by the provider. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure that includes network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but has control over the deployed applications and possibly application hosting environment configuration.

Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

The consumer is provided the capability to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, deployed applications, and possibly limited control of some of the networking components (for example, host firewalls).

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