From the course: Cloud Computing for Business Leaders

What is cloud?

From the course: Cloud Computing for Business Leaders

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What is cloud?

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- Does your organization use cloud? This question often confuses people and that's because cloud means different things to different organizations. In simple terms, cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the internet with the pay-as-you-go pricing. So instead of buying, owning and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services such as compute bar and storage on-demand from a cloud provider. Cloud services can be grouped into three primary service models, software as a service or SaaS, platform as a service or PaaS, and infrastructure as a service or IaaS. A SaaS service model is where an organization uses software application that is installed on cloud provider's data centers and pays for it on a subscription basis. If you access email, video conferencing, Office 365 or any other software over the web, you are using SaaS. In a PaaS service model, a cloud provider provides you a computing platform which typically includes operating system, programming environment, database and web servers. PaaS is a great option for developers or companies who want to create standard web API or mobile apps and do not need the control of the underlying operating system or virtual machine. They basically use the platform provided by the cloud provider on subscription basis and develop their applications on that platform. In an IaaS service model, cloud providers provide an organization with the most basic infrastructure elements such as compute, storage and networking services. This model provides organizations the highest level of flexibility and management control over the IT resources. When you talk in terms of hundreds of services offered by multiple cloud providers, it can get extremely confusing. As long as you understand which of these three cloud service models your organization will use, you will be able to understand the impact it'll have on your business and on your customers.

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