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Cloud computing is on-demand access, via the internet, to computing resources—applications, servers (physical servers and virtual servers), data storage, development tools, networking capabilities, and more—hosted at a remote data center managed by a cloud services provider (or CSP). The CSP makes these resources available for a monthly subscription fee or bills them according to usage.
IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) , and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) are the three most common models of cloud services, and it’s not uncommon for an organization to use all three.
Public cloud is a type of cloud computing in which a cloud service provider makes computing resources—anything from SaaS applications, to individual virtual machines (VMs), to bare metal computing hardware, to complete enterprise-grade infrastructures and development platforms—available to users over the public internet.
A private cloud is typically hosted on-premises in the customer's data center. But a private cloud can also be hosted on an independent cloud provider’s infrastructure or built on rented infrastructure housed in an offsite data center.
Hybrid cloud is just what it sounds like—a combination of public and private cloud environments. Specifically, and ideally, a hybrid cloud connects an organization's private cloud services and public clouds into a flexible infrastructure for running the organization’s applications and workloads.
Multicloud is the use of two or more clouds from two or more different cloud providers. Having a multicloud environment can be as simple using email SaaS from one vendor and image editing SaaS from another.
Traditionally, security concerns have been the primary obstacle for organizations considering cloud services, particularly public cloud services. In response to demand, however, the security offered by cloud service providers is steadily outstripping on-premises security solutions.
With 25% of organizations planning to move all their applications to cloud within the next year, it would seem that cloud computing use cases are limitless. But even for companies not planning a wholesale shift to the cloud, certain initiatives and cloud computing are a match made in IT heaven.
Disaster recovery and business continuity have always been a natural for cloud because cloud provides cost-effective redundancy to protect data against system failures and the physical distance required to recover data and applications in the event of a local outage or disaster. All of the major public cloud providers offer Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS).