Question

Organisations are increasingly moving towards the cloud as an implementation option, making use of different services (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS) and deployment models (public, private, hybrid, community).

From an organisational website (again, either from the examples provided in previous tutorials, or a ‘new’ one of your choice), investigate what the organisation is doing in terms of using the cloud.

What are the potential benefits and risks associated with its current strategy?

Answer 1

Why Organisations are moving towards cloud: Cloud technologies are becoming one of the major investments for all sizes of organizations. The goal generally includes plans to to reduce costs, consolidate billing, ensure server availability and plan for disaster recovery. Cloud computing not only changes how so many businesses store and access data, but it is also changing how many of these businesses operate. Large businesses have an advantage when it comes to the cloud. They can work with the major cloud providers and get every service perk they need. But one of the great things about the cloud is that even small and medium-sized operations can benefit from it.  Cloud computing increases efficiency, helps improve cash flow, and offers many more benefits. Cloud computing is so important because it offers flexibility, data recovery, little to no maintenance, easy access and a higher level of security.

what is cloud: Cloud computing is renting resources, like storage space or CPU cycles, on another company's computers. You only pay for what you use. The company providing these services is referred to as a cloud provider. Some example providers are Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. The cloud provider is responsible for the physical hardware required to execute your work, and for keeping it up-to-date. The computing services offered tend to vary by cloud provider. However, typically they include compute power, storage, Networking, Analytics, etc.

There are certain services and models working behind the scene making the cloud computing feasible and accessible to end users. Following are the working models for cloud computing:

• Deployment Models
• Service Models

Deployment Models: Deployment models define the type of access to the cloud, i.e., how the cloud is located? Cloud can have any of the four types of access: Public, Private, Hybrid, and Community.

• Public Cloud: A public cloud is a cloud service offered to multiple customers by a cloud provider. The term "public cloud" is used to differentiate between the original cloud model of services accessed over the Internet and the private cloud model. Public clouds include SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS services.
• Private Cloud: A private cloud is a cloud service that is not shared with any other organization. The private cloud user has the cloud to themselves.
• Hybrid cloud: A Hybrid Cloud is a solution that combines a private cloud with one or more public cloud services, with proprietary software enabling communication between each distinct service.
• Community Cloud: A Community cloud is a cloud infrastructure that allows systems and services to be accessible by a group of several organizations to share the information.

Cloud computing services have following types of services model:

• IaaS (Infra as a service)
• SaaS (Software as a service)
• PaaS (Platform as a service)

• Iaas: IaaS provides the infrastructure such as virtual machines and other resources like virtual-machine disk image library, block and file-based storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area networks etc. Infrastructure as service or IaaS is the basic layer in cloud computing model.

• PaaS: Paas or platform as a service model provides you computing platforms which typically includes operating system, programming language execution environment, database, web server. technically It is a layer on top of IaaS as the second thing you demand after Infrastructure is platform.

• Saas: In a SaaS you are provided access to application services installed at a server. You don’t have to worry about installation, maintenance or coding of that software. You can access and operate the software with just your browser. You don’t have to download or install any kind of setup or OS, the software is just available for you to access and operate. The software maintenance or setup or help will be provided by SaaS provider company and you will only have to pay for your usage.