Cloud Services: The Future Of Data Sharing and Storage

To see that the cloud is profoundly transforming the business world, you need only scan the headlines of leading business and technology journals. The cloud services shift may be even bigger than the transition to managed services years ago.

Once at work, you use the cloud whether you write code using Github as a code repository, share a document with a colleague using Box, enter customer information into Salesforce, or onboard a new employee using Workday. When we go home, we may open up vacation photos a friend sent to us on Dropbox without giving it a second thought that we are consuming a cloud service built on top of another cloud service (Dropbox is built on Amazon AWS).

All of these are cloud services, yet we experience them in completely different ways, which raises several questions: What is a cloud service? Where is the cloud? What is the difference between the cloud and the Internet? And how many flavors does the cloud come in?

What Is Cloud Service?

 

A cloud service is any service made available to users on demand via the Internet from a cloud computing provider's servers as opposed to being provided from a company's own on-premises servers. Cloud services are designed to provide easy, scalable access to applications, resources and services, and are fully managed by a cloud services provider. Cloud services are delivered over the internet and accessible globally from the internet. Cloud services provide many IT services traditionally hosted in-house, including provisioning an application/database server from the cloud, replacing in-house storage/backup with cloud storage and accessing software and applications directly from a web browser without prior installation.

There are three basic types of cloud services:

Software as a Service (SaaS)

A software delivery method that provides access to software and its functions remotely as a Web-based service. Software as a Service allows organizations to access business functionality at a cost typically less than paying for licensed applications since SaaS pricing is based on a monthly fee.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

A computing platform being delivered as a service. Here the platform is outsourced  in place of a company or data center purchasing and managing their own hardware and software layers.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

This is a computer infrastructure, such as virtualization, being delivered as a service. IaaS is popular in the data center where software and servers are purchased as a fully outsourced service and usually billed on usage and how much of the resource is used

Finally, Cloud services provide great flexibility in provisioning, duplicating and scaling resources to balance the requirements of users, hosted applications and solutions. Cloud services are built, operated and managed by a cloud service provider, which works to ensure end-to-end availability, reliability and security of the cloud.