Question

Complete the reading of NIST Special Publication 800-145 (2011). NIST Definition of Cloud Computing, then branch out into Internet research on how the term “Cloud Computing” has evolved and what it means now. You can talk about how cloud services are increasingly relevant to businesses today. Feel free to use an example for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Software as a Service (Saas) and talk about why companies are moving their onsite infrastructure to the cloud in many cases. Think Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, or any number of cloud providers.

Go ahead and have a little fun with it if you like also: Pretend you are an IT manager and need to recommend a solution for moving a piece of software or hardware into the cloud. What provider would you use and why? Or would you instead recommend keeping servers/software in house?

You must post your initial response (with APA 6th ed or higher references) before being able to review other students' responses. Once you have made your first response, you will be able to reply to other students’ posts. You are expected to make a minimum of 3 responses to your fellow students' posts.

Answer 1

How the term “Cloud Computing” has evolved and what it means now:
Cloud Computing term and the service has evolved from different concepts such as grid, utility, and SaaS. It is rapidly evolving, improving, enhancing itself, and emerging. It started with providing users and organizations only the email, storage, and compute services in the beginning when it was a child. We never knew or realized these were cloud computing technology services. However, now, with all the awareness and our conciousness we know we are using cloud computing technology in every possible thing we touch physically or virtually with respect to data. Now, it provides and offers so many in fact thousands of features, options, services, solutions, services, resources, products, etc., combined.

Cloud Computing has evolved since 1950. It evolved gradually. However, now it is evolving rapidly, tremendously and accelerating at high speed in its new innovations. In a way, the evolution of cloud computing has only started. There is a way lot to go.

Cloud computing is a paradigm which has been evolving rapidly suiting every use cases, scenarios, cases, situations, examples of individuals, organizations, governments, and other sector, industry entities to use IT solutions, and services on the cloud platform.

Cloud computing does not access resources directly, but makes use of and accesses them remotely through service over the Internet or public Internet for any application or software to work, with the resources been accessed running in clusters from a single location.

Cloud computing is a computing and public utility model which is cheaper than utility computing, offering resources for the users to use them on a pay-as-you-go pricing model, and even other pricing models such as reserved, one-time or initial payment, spot resources utilization and payment for the same, with all the resources located in different locations (data centers or availability zones or sets) controlled by the cloud vendor and yet the users are given options to choose one place (geographical region with sets, availability zones, sets, and data centers) for their resources to run from.

Cloud Computing now means a lot and everything for most of the organizations, small, medium, and large-scale companies, start-ups, defense, governments, health sector, financial institutions, etc. Cloud Computing technology provides different deployment strategies, different cloud models, service models, and deployment models, and types.

Cloud Computing technology is being reviewed, adopted and used by system planners, program managers, technologists, and others adopting as users, employees, customers, consumers, or providers of cloud services.

How cloud services are increasingly relevant to businesses today:
Cloud services are increasingly very relevant to businesses today and it would be in the future as well. These days, there are companies that have 100% of their IT infrastructure, applications, resources, systems, services, solutions, operations, support, etc., all on a Public Cloud Service Provider (CSP) platform.

Example for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Software as a Service (Saas):

Examples for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) are AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) which is the computing resource and service, server, Virtual Servers, Virtual Machines (VMs) or Instances, Google Compute Engine (GCE)- a server, computing service, and Microsoft Azure as these providers and services offer Compute- virtualized or bare metal servers, storage devices, resource, and services, networking, and networking services such as firewalls, DNS, etc.

Examples for Software as a Service (Saas) solutions, services, software, and applications are Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps for Work or G-Suite, Google's G-mail, SalesForce, ZenDesk, DocuSign, etc.

Why companies are moving their onsite infrastructure to the cloud, say, Amazon Web Services (AWS) in many cases is because all these public CSPs provide and offer all the IT infrastructure, platform, resources, services, solutions for software development, innovation, building applications, deployment, testing, provisioning, implementation, integration, delivery, administration, monitoring, management, maintenance, incident management, and support.

Companies are moving to and adopting the Cloud Computing technology with its cloud model for the simple, and obvious reason for what it is which offers different businesses, individuals, organizations, governments, profit and non-profit organizations with its five important different and very useful characteristics such as On-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service, three different service models such as SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and four different deployment models such as private, public, hybrid, and community cloud to choose from for every use case they may come across.

Pretending to be an IT manager and when needed to recommend a solution for moving a piece of software or hardware into the cloud, the provider I would use, or I would suggest my employer, organization, or other organizations to use would be the public CSP, specifically and preferably, AWS and the reason being:

* AWS has services, resources, solutions, options, features, flexibility, to support, deploy, run any software, applications, hardware, networking devices, or components on its cloud platform.
* AWS is the number one or the topmost and major player in the public CSPs market.
* It has been listed as the highest-ranked public CSP in the market.
* They provide the highest security for IT infrastructure on their cloud platform.
* They provide all three IaaS, Platform as a Service (PaaS), and SaaS cloud model services and solutions.
* AWS, say, their Amazon S3 service, is affordable, are a multi-purpose means for storing data in the cloud.
* Its Amazon S3 service is one of the best cloud storage services. It can store any kind of data such as text, pdf, audio, video, etc., and is HIPAA compliant.
* AWS offers on the go pricing model for the usages of its cloud services, resources, and solutions.
* AWS offers 1 year of Free Tier service within limits.
* AWS provides high-performance services, products, appliances, solutions, and resources.
* AWS provides a very high deployment speed.
* It offers high security.
* It offers a lot of flexibility in the usage of its services, solutions, resources, products, and features.

I would instead NOT recommend keeping servers/software in the house as it is very difficult to keep the entire organization's IT infrastructure secure, managed, monitored, administered, maintained all the time. There are many other factors why I would not recommend keeping servers/software/applications or any other IT infrastructure devices, components, or resources on-premise or private data center.