For those who’ve been stranded on a desert island, lost in the Amazon, or with their head in the clouds over the last few years, we have some breaking news: the adoption ofcloud computing is rapidly picking up steam. Because cloud computing is kind of a big deal (like, change the face of IT big), we thought we would provide a brief cloud computing introduction. Here are some key points you need to know about cloud computing to help your organization reap its benefits and get you back into the 21st century.
1. There are two versions of cloud to know about
There are several varieties of cloud computing services. Depending on your company’s IT needs, you might be able to use a cloud service instead of investing in new IT hardware. Two of the more popular versions of cloud offerings are Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). With SaaS, the cloud service provider hosts your enterprise applications and associated data on its servers and storage systems. Users gain access to SaaS applications using a Web browser. And your company would typically pay a fee per user per month. With IaaS, the provider offers virtual machines, physical servers, storage, switching, and connectivity resources to run your enterprise applications on a pay-as-you-go basis. You are responsible for installing and maintaining the operating system and application or virtual machine; the provider is responsible for managing the infrastructure hardware that the applications or virtual machines run on.
2. Cloud Computing Services offer greater flexibility in delivering IT services
Business today is very dynamic. Cloud services let companies quickly ramp capacity up AND down to match business needs.
In contrast to legacy hosting services, which often locked companies into contracts for multiple months or years, today’s cloud computing services are offered by the month or based on the consumption of resources. This is a perfect match for some industries, such as retail and financial services, which are subject to boom times and quiet times in their normal business cycles. Maybe you have a new application and are unsure of the speed of growth. A cloud computing service lets you expand and contract IT resources in sync with those cycles.