Cloud Services
Cloud services is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. These services are broadly divided into three categories:
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
- Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
The name "cloud service" was inspired by the cloud symbol that's often used to represent the Internet in flowcharts and diagrams. A cloud service has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional hosting:
- It is sold on demand - typically by the minute or the hour
- It is elastic - a user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any
given time - The service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing but a
personal computer and Internet access)
Significant innovations in virtualization and distributed computing, as well as improved access to high-speed Internet and a weak economy, have accelerated interest in cloud computing.
A cloud can be private or public. A public cloud sells services to anyone on the Internet. A private cloud is a proprietary network or a data center that supplies hosted services to a limited number of people. When a service provider uses public cloud resources to create their private cloud, the result is called a virtual private cloud. Private or public, the
goal of cloud computing is to provide easy, scalable access to computing resources and IT services.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service provides virtual servers with unique IP addresses and storage on demand. Customers use the provider's application program interface (API) to start, stop, access and configure their virtual servers and storage. Cloud computing allows a company to pay for only as much capacity as is needed, and bring more online
as soon as required.
Platform-as-a-service in the cloud is defined as a set of software and product development tools hosted by the provider. PaaS providers may use APIs, website portals or gateway software installed on the customer's computer.
Software-as-a-service supplies the hardware infrastructure, the software product and interacts with the user through a front-end portal. SaaS is a very broad market. Services can be anything from Web-based email to inventory control and database processing. Because the service provider hosts both the application and the data, the end user is
free to use the service from anywhere.
Contact INCS today to see how we can help your company get up into the clouds.