Cloud Computing Technology is no longer in its infancy (though the technology itself is still being innovated and polished, and will most likely further evolve in the future), so the industry has already gleaned a good picture of its primary benefits.

With regards to the hotel industry, the cloud can help in the following ways:

Reduce costs and resources

Since cloud services can be acquired on an “as needed” basis, hotels no longer need to invest a hefty sum at the forefront just to get a basic backend running, as they only need to pay for the exact amount of computing power and storage that they need.

 Cloud computing gives you the flexibility to work remotely

Ever wondered what it would be like to work remotely. With cloud computing, you can find out! The cloud gives you the flexibility to work from anywhere. All you need is an internet connection and a device, like a computer, tablet, or mobile phone. Then, you can access all of your critical business application from anywhere. The whole world is your office, and you can work remotely without having to sacrifice productivity!

Cloud computing helps you improve the guest experience

With cloud computing, you can improve staff collaboration immensely. So, if your guests need assistance, your staff can be more responsive in a quicker and more efficient way. Not only that – cloud computing helps you to reduce downtime. That way, you and your staff can keep your guests happy and keep them coming back to your hotel in the future. 

Cloud provides reliability and security

With the cloud, you store your data securely and remotely instead of in an on-site physical location. That way, you don’t have to worry about losing all of your data if a natural disaster or security breach occurs at your location. Along with the changing business model for the deployment of SaaS, security must also change with the adoption of cloud computing. The ownership of software shifts from the client to the provider, along with the responsibility of providing a secure environment. Security is one of the most often-cited objections to embracing cloud computing for most individuals and corporations. Companies may only feel comfortable using some of the more common cloud services, such as email and payroll services, but have reservations in trusting newer services that so far remain unproven security-wise. There are regulations that must be met before a corporation can move data to the cloud. These legal requirements necessitate that auditability and data confidentiality must be proven to be secure before a corporation can make the migration to the cloud. Some key issues about cloud security deal with privacy, identity, and accountability for the information managed. One of the biggest issues about security deals with the matter of control of the cloud information. The corporation must make sure that it solely controls the information that it distributes over the cloud. If all of the corporation’s business data is stored on a virtual server, the data will be more vulnerable to cyber-attacks and hacking. A problem that arises from hacking and cyber-attacks deals with the protection of intellectual property management. The cloud computing provider must ensure the privacy of their customer’s data and that all data will be kept confidential. Cyber-attacks could also harm a provider’s reliability. Truong suggests that overload capacity, delay, and breakdown of the cloud could result in the interruption of the customer’s business and affect their business performance. Cloud systems could actually provide better overall security benefits in terms of the benefits of scale and with standardizing interfaces. These benefits could provide better protection in terms of patch management, filtering, rapidity to the response to security attacks, and deployment of standard IS policy. There are already many benefits in security from cloud services. Web browsers (all of the major web browsers now automatically update via cloud services) have built-in features, which check URL blacklists, in order to prevent viruses and malware from suspect or malicious websites from infecting a computer browser.

The cloud is basically a metaphor for the Internet. Cloud computing is a method of making computer services via the Internet accessible. A company can eliminate two major enduring problems in IT service provisioning by adopting cloud computing: the typically large upfront costs from acquiring computational assets and the typical time delay in building out and deploying computer software applications. By eliminating upfront costs, precious capital can be saved for other important business decisions. The current cloud model is composed of three service models, cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), cloud platform as a service (PaaS), and cloud software as a service (SaaS). In IaaS, the consumer can deploy and operate arbitrary software, such as, operating systems and software applications. The consumer doesn’t control the infrastructure. The consumer has control over the operating systems, deployed applications, storage, and sometimes slight control of select networking modules. In PaaS, the consumer can deploy onto the infrastructure their consumer-created or applications created by using tools and programming languages supported by the cloud provider. The consumer doesn’t have control over the cloud infrastructure, servers, storage, operating systems, or network, but the user has control over the applications and application-hosting environment configurations. In SaaS, the consumer can use the cloud provider’s applications running on the cloud infrastructure. These applications are available from various client sources or devices using a thin client interface. For example, a web browser or perhaps web-based email can be the thin client. The consumer doesn’t control the cloud infrastructure, operating systems, storage servers, or network. The user may not have control over individual application capabilities, but may have access to limited specific application software configuration settings. It’s important to know the difference between the types of cloud infrastructures. A company could choose to adapt their potential move to just certain cloud services if they have already expended capital on certain IT hardware or software. Companies must weigh the potential benefits versus the risks in a cost analysis before deciding to implement cloud computing. A potential customer must carefully analyze every potential use for cloud computing. These uses must be examined from a wide range of perspectives, such as from a legal, regulatory, technological, and business strategy viewpoint to determine if cost savings justify making a full move to the cloud or if making a smaller move such as by using PaaS, SaaS, or IaaS service models make more sense. If the costs or risks are found to be too high, then making partial moves to IaaS, SaaS, or PaaS might be much more efficient. If a company determines that risks aren’t too high, but that it isn’t prepared for a complete move to the clouds, then a smaller or subtle move to the clouds might be more cost efficient. In a private cloud, all the technology components, servers, and software are maintained by an individual organization. The solution or system setup might be managed by the user or even a third party host, but it’s nevertheless provided for the benefit of solely one organization. The development of private clouds is becoming more popular within large corporations. In a private cloud, a user can use a pooled resource. For example, not every laptop needs to have a specific software program installed on it. The user may use a pooled software program from one server with other users connected to this private cloud. In the future, users may not even require the use of a hard drive in every single laptop. This could help corporations minimize hardware costs. A public cloud is commercially made available to everyone or to larger industry groups. A public cloud is typically maintained by the provider of the specific service. Examples of a public cloud are salesforce.com, Amazon’s EC2 cloud offering, and Google’s Gmail. Large corporations are increasingly using this type of deployment for discrete services and are experimenting with various ways to use this model. This cloud deployment model offers great potential flexibility and savings because of the large economy of scale that is utilized. On the other hand, it grants the provider virtually exclusive control over all the technological capabilities, and typically makes the user totally dependent on their service.

There are three major service types which can be distributed by the cloud, infrastructure, software, and platform. Infrastructure services are services offered by a remote delivery of a complete system of computer infrastructure. This infrastructure is composed of such things as storage devices, virtual computers, and servers. Software services are distributed through the Internet using smaller, sophisticated applications. This eliminates the necessity of having to maintain and install software on numerous laptops and desktops. Platform services are services such as operating systems, web servers, middleware, and data basing provided remotely by vendors. In IaaS, a company outsources the required equipment used to fulfill IT operations, such as, servers, storage, networking components, and other hardware. The IaaS provider owns the technology equipment and is responsible for operating and maintaining the equipment. Cloud clients may typically pay by a per-use basis. In SaaS, various types of software applications are distributed by the Application Service Provider (ASP) as rentals through the Internet. In PaaS, clients access computer services, such as, data basing and storage within a virtualized delivery system through the Internet. Open source software (OSS) is anticipated to become a key enabler of cloud computing. Cloud adoption should be enhanced by the growing ubiquity of this freely used, OSS for the cloud infrastructure. There are major costs connected with cloud computing – storage and network bandwidth costs, costs for the application (SaaS), and CPU costs. The ability to modify source code makes OSS very attractive for companies. Proprietary software applications usually don’t allow, nor provide clients access to source code. OSS, conversely, allows users full access to the source code. This is valuable for companies, since this software can be manipulated to suit specific company requirements. Since there’s a growing number of free OSS applications, promoting and allowing greater cloud access to OSS would reduce costs for SaaS. An example of one major OSS system is Google’s Chromium Projects. The Google OSS project is developing an operating system that is cloud-based. One of the most important enablers of cloud computing has been met by utilizing a commodity-driven purchase of computing resources using very large economies of scale in the construction and operation of extremely large computer data centers in low-cost locations. These locations with very large economies of scale have uncovered from factors of to in the decrease in hardware necessary, cost of electricity, software, operations, and network bandwidth. There are four aspects which will further bring tremendous cost savings with regard to the diminished need for computer hardware. The first aspect is the ability of cloud computing resources that are available on demand, which will be quick enough to support seemingly infinite data load surges, subsequently eliminating the necessity for cloud users from having to plan far ahead and to make provisions for computing bottlenecks. The second will be the eradication of up-front commitment costs for cloud users. This will allow companies to start small and allow for incremental increases in resources as their needs grow. The third will be the ability to pay on a short-term basis for computing resources as needed such as, purchasing processing power by hour or storage by day. The fourth will be the freedom to immediately terminate services when they aren’t needed.

HIPAR HMS is designed as a tailored solution based upon customer needs. HIPAR is a hotel management system, also known as a HMS is a comprehensive software application used to cover some basic objectives such as coordinating the operational functions of front office, sales and planning etc. HIPAR automates hotel functions like guest bookings, guest details, online reservations, point of sale, banquets, food and beverage costing, materials management, HR and payroll, maintenance management, quality management and other amenities. This way HIPAR is full featured product take care of automating all the functional departments of a hotel.

Below are a few advantages of HIPAR:

User Friendly: HIPAR hotel management system is easy to use. All the features of the application are visible on the graphical interface and you can easily locate them without much difficulty.

 Multiple Modules: HIPAR comes with multiple modules for different departments of hotel industry. With the help of these modules you can work on any department of the hotel. Being specially designed keeping in mind the special workstations of a hotel, these modules have interactive user interface that is easy to use.

 Web Based System: HIPAR is web based hotel management software and that opens a plethora of functionalities for a hotel. Getting new guests into the hotel is no longer difficult. From the guests’ point of view too it isn’t difficult to book rooms with the help of the web based system.