Cloud Computing: A solution to Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Cloud Computing and GIS

Geographical Information Systems or Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) is a collection of tools that captures, stores, analyzes, manages, and presents data that are linked to geographical locations. GIS plays an essential role in wide range of areas and is extensively adopted nowadays. In the simplest terms, GIS is the merging of cartography, statistical analysis, hardware, software and data. GIS is commonly used as a supporting system for making best possible decisions through spatial and non-spatial data relations, visualization and processing. GIS is beneficial and works well when made available to as many people as possible everywhere and anytime at the expense of very less resources in terms of technology and expenditure. Over a few decades efforts are being made to upgrade the conventional GIS applications in order to provide broad spectrum services to the users across the globe. ’Cloud computing’, a term which has become popular in recent years, has been described as “the next natural step in the evolution of on-demand information technology services and products”. Cloud Computing can be applied to solve and overcome the challenges in GIS applications. This paper presents a brief evaluation of Cloud Computing approach to GIS and proposes a multi-tiered architecture for GIS Cloud System. KeywordsCloud Computing, High Performance Computing, Microsoft's Windows Azure, Elastic Computing Platform, Geographical Information Systems.