A research done Sina Rail Pars CEO regarding Cloud services in Logistics

1. An overview of Cloud Services

 

Nowadays for dealing with increasing instability of customers’ demands and market conditions, companies are making serious efforts to operate a more dynamic supply chain. Because the supply chains depend on information, a significant part of designing a supply chain is flexible solutions. According to such background, it won’t be surprising that the subject of cloud computing is absorbing more interest as all main businesses worldwide have already applied cloud computing technologies in other business areas successfully. Some experts foretold that the market of cloud-based services will reach approximately 150 billion dollars by 2014. Many industrial organizations such as retail, banking, and consumer products are using cloud-based technologies to analyze data, provide applications to employees and run special projects.

Considering today’s effective logistic operations, there are two very significant pre-conditions which include: information broadcast and information sharing. They are effective in every aspect of logistic activities.  Exact and timely information about supply, demand and control is required for cargo flow management. They also reduce prices, improve efficiency and benefit the company. Nowadays because of the challenging marketing competition, more enterprises pay serious attention to information management. Appropriate information sharing to every member of a whole supply chain will cause price reduction and logistic service improvement. Today’s logistic development takes advantage from a firm platform provided by information networking technologies. Its basis is on the logistic information system of each individual company, by gathering common data for providing basic support information for the collaborating companies. It is helpful to meet the needs of basic common data sharing and contribute to support various functions of information system.

In the current information networking environment the trend for providing logistic resource sharing is to use information technology in order to gain both physical and virtual logistic information.

Thus, the mixture of modern communication technology and computer data processing technology has made an interconnected network information system. Overall advantages will be flourished by connecting each logistic subsystem. It will also reduce lead time of information flow, lessen transportation time, harmonize transportation channels, ameliorate transparency, better performance, and optimize the network logistic, and optimize the network logistic management system. It is a thorough solution for overall network logistic operation.

2. Related work

The advent of new cloud computing services is constantly growing. An increasing number of enterprises and companies understand the advantage and opportunities of using IT resources with infinite scalability and on-demand services at pay per use conditions on the Internet, in contrast with “classical” default installation and operation.

Cloud computing promotes the cooperation and collaboration of several small and medium-sized logistics companies without huge expenses in IT hardware and software. The enlargement of cloud computing platforms, services and solutions for different business purposes is controlled by various institutions, academic and commercial, both on national and international levels.

It was late 2007 when cloud computing first appeared. As a new business model, it has and will have a giant influence on the whole information technology (IT) industry. It allocates tasks to various partaken resources permitting every user to gain storage space and a wide range of software services. The role of cloud computing is gently coming into view and companies such as Google, IBM, Amazon and Yahoo are after fostering the cloud computing technology. To keep up with the rapid speed of intricacy and service levels in logistics, it is required to maintain enough integrated ICT infrastructure and services. Recent researches present a high interest and influencing perspective of cloud computing for logistics service providers in the time of a few years to keep pace with the growing IT capacity needs.

 

3. Definitions and concept

Cloud computing is appearing as a partaken infrastructure approach which based on the development of a new computing model, like Distributed Computing, Grid Computing, Parallel Computing. It will bring a primary change in work and business model. In cloud computing, users will be able to get the required hardware, software and other resources, partaken resources, quickly and easily access the services they need by using their cellphones, computers and other devices through the network.

In user’s perspective, resources in the cloud are limitlessly expandable, and can be purchased and used at any time.

 

3.1. What is Cloud?

Cloud computing is a novelized service model in information technology field, it has been regarded as the kernel of next generation of information technology revolution and business application model innovation. Recently cloud computing has absorbed gigantic attention by governmental departments and enterprises, some new policies and technologies have enhanced its research and development.

By using cloud computing, companies will have access to IT based services comprising infrastructure, applications, platforms and business processes through Internet.

Cloud technologies let IT develop response to the changing demands of the business, bring up new services and open up new markets, and as a result, help companies to maintain high performance. However the term “Cloud Computing” was invented recently, but some elements of the concept, like timesharing and virtual machines have been around for several decades.

The main reason for the growth of cloud computing in today’s businesses is that the Internet and Internet technologies are comprehensive and universal and have been combined with progression in virtualization, hardware commoditization, standardization, and open-source software. A main catalyst is the success of big Internet enterprises like Google, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft.

Cloud computing as a modern processing model on the basis of information sharing simulation, provides virtual resource storage and superior possibilities in data processing and data storage and management. It also lets users enjoy the benefits in lowering expenses, sharing data and bettering the efficiency and therefore having access and using information easily.

 

3.2. Cloud service related definitions

Mobile computing: mobile computing is a usual term used to call different devices that permit users to access data and information wherever they are.

Cloud computing: the date center hardware and software is called a cloud. Cloud hosts Web services and applications which are available through Internet. Cloud computing has been a significant computing way to supply computing as the utility (after water, electricity, telephone and gas) to eradicate the demands of general business community. Cloud computing is related to the applications, the hardware and software delivered as services on the Internet.

Cloud services: there are four types of clouds including; public, private, community and hybrid. Three types of service models are presented by cloud computing comprising Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).

Cloud computing is defined by a number of descriptions. One commonly approved is that it is the flourish of distributed processing, parallel processing and grid computing, or the commercial understanding of computer science concepts.

Simply put, it doesn’t matter if you’re using a PC, laptop, telephone, PDA or other devices. As long as you can use cloud computing, you will no longer be worrying about the overwhelming virus and downloading system patches or waste a long time surfing the Internet to install an application software. You just connect to the network and cloud will do all the rest. Cloud computing was defined by NIST (National Institute of Standard and Technology) as: “ a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resource (e.g. networks, servers, storage, application and services) that can rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

Gartner defines Cloud Computing as a way of computing in which IT-enabled capabilities in huge scales are presented “as a service” to external clients who use Internet technologies.

 

In other words cloud computing is a pay-per-use consumption and delivery model that provides real-time delivery of adjustable computing resources. Usually, these resources are delivered on the Internet to several enterprises that pay just for what they need. Another definition might be that cloud computing is a large-scale distributed computing paradigm that is controlled by economies of scale, in which a partaken, abstracted, virtualized, dynamically-scalable, managed computing power, storage platform and services are