Key Takeaways

• Discover the top benefits of cloud computing on cost, performance, security, and more.
• Understand the differences between public, private, and hybrid cloud deployment models.
• Learn about the four broad categories of cloud services: IaaS, PaaS, serverless, and SaaS.
• Explore cloud computing services from Microsoft—and find out which cloud computing option best suits your needs.

Top Benefits of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a big shift from the traditional way businesses think about IT resources. Here are seven common reasons organizations are turning to cloud computing services:

Cost

Moving to the cloud helps companies optimize IT costs by eliminating capital expenses for hardware, software, and datacenter operations.

Cloud computing lets you offload some or all of the expense and effort of purchasing, installing, configuring and managing mainframe computers and other on-premises infrastructure. You only pay for cloud-based infrastructure and other computing resources as you use them.

Speed

Cloud services are self-service and on-demand, allowing rapid provisioning of resources with minimal effort.

With cloud technologies, your organization can use enterprise applications in minutes instead of waiting weeks or months for IT to respond to a request, purchase and configure supporting hardware and install software. This feature empowers users—specifically DevOps and other development teams—to help use cloud-based software and support infrastructure.

Global Scale

Cloud computing enables elastic scaling of resources based on demand and location.

Cloud computing provides elasticity and self-service provisioning, so instead of purchasing excess capacity that sits unused during slow periods, you can scale capacity up and down in response to spikes and dips in traffic. You can also use your cloud provider’s global network to spread your applications closer to users worldwide.

Productivity

Reduces time spent on infrastructure management, allowing IT teams to focus on strategic goals.

Performance

Cloud services run on secure, high-performance datacenters with reduced latency and improved efficiency.

Reliability

Supports data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity through redundant cloud infrastructure.

Security

Cloud providers offer robust security policies and technologies to protect data and applications.

Traditionally, security concerns have been the primary obstacle for organizations considering cloud services, mainly public cloud services. Maintaining cloud security demands different procedures and employee skill sets than legacy IT environments.

Shared responsibility for security: Generally, the cloud service provider is responsible for securing cloud infrastructure, and the customer is responsible for protecting its data within the cloud. However, it’s also essential to clearly define data ownership between private and public third parties.

Data encryption: Data should be encrypted while at rest, in transit and in use. Customers need to maintain complete control over security keys and hardware security modules.

Collaborative management: Proper communication and clear, understandable processes between IT, operations and security teams help ensure seamless cloud integrations that are secure and sustainable.

Security and compliance monitoring: IT, operations and security teams must understand all regulatory compliance standards applicable to their industry and establish active monitoring of all connected systems and cloud-based services to maintain visibility of all data exchanges across all environments—on-premises, private cloud, hybrid cloud and at the edge.

Cloud security management tools

Identity and access management (IAM): IAM tools and services automate policy-driven enforcement protocols for all users attempting to access both on-premises and cloud-based services.

Data loss and prevention (DLP): DLP services combine remediation alerts, data encryption and other preventive measures to protect all stored data, whether at rest or in motion.

Security information and event management (SIEM): SIEM is a comprehensive security orchestration solution that automates threat monitoring, detection and response in cloud-based environments. SIEM technology uses artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technologies to correlate log data from various sources (for example, network devices, firewalls) across multiple platforms and digital assets. This allows IT teams to successfully apply their network security protocols, enabling them to react to potential threats quickly.

Automated data and compliance platforms: Automated software solutions provide compliance controls and centralized data collection to help organizations adhere to regulations specific to their industry. Regular compliance updates can be baked into these platforms so organizations can adapt to ever-changing regulatory compliance standards.

Types of Cloud Computing

Public Cloud

Operated by third-party providers like Microsoft Azure, offering services over the internet with shared infrastructure.

A public cloud is a type of cloud computing in which a cloud service provider makes computing resources available to users over the public internet. These include SaaS applications, individual virtual machines (VMs), bare metal computing hardware, complete enterprise-grade infrastructures, and development platforms. These resources might be accessible for free or according to subscription-based or pay-per-usage pricing models.

The public cloud provider owns, manages and assumes all responsibility for the data centers, hardware and infrastructure on which its customers’ workloads run. It typically provides high-bandwidth network connectivity to help ensure high performance and rapid access to applications and data.

Public cloud is a multi-tenant environment where all customers pool and share the cloud provider’s data center infrastructure and other resources. In the world of the leading public cloud vendors, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud®, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud, these customers can number in the millions.

Most enterprises have moved portions of their computing infrastructure to the public cloud since public cloud services are elastic and readily scalable, flexibly adjusting to meet changing workload demands. The promise of greater efficiency and cost savings through paying only for what they use attracts customers to the public cloud. Others seek to reduce spending on hardware and on-premises infrastructure.

Private Cloud

Used exclusively by one organization, hosted either onsite or by a third-party provider, with dedicated infrastructure.

A private cloud is a cloud environment where all cloud infrastructure and computing resources are dedicated to one customer only. Private cloud combines many benefits of cloud computing—including elasticity, scalability and ease of service delivery—with the access control, security and resource customization of on-premises infrastructure.

A private cloud is typically hosted on-premises in the customer’s data center. However, it can also be hosted on an independent cloud provider’s infrastructure or built on rented infrastructure housed in an offsite data center.

Many companies choose a private cloud over a public cloud environment to meet regulatory compliance requirements. Large-scale entities such as government agencies, healthcare organizations and financial institutions often opt for private cloud settings for workloads that deal with confidential documents, personally identifiable information (PII), intellectual property, medical records, financial data or other sensitive data.

Hybrid Cloud

Combines public and private clouds, enabling data and application portability for greater flexibility and optimization.

A hybrid cloud is just what it sounds like: a combination of public cloud, private cloud and on-premises environments. Specifically (and ideally), a hybrid cloud connects a combination of these three environments into a single, flexible infrastructure for running the organization’s applications and workloads.

At first, organizations turned to hybrid cloud computing models primarily to migrate portions of their on-premises data into private cloud infrastructure and then connect that infrastructure to public cloud infrastructure hosted off-premises by cloud vendors. This process was done through a packaged hybrid cloud solution such as Red Hat OpenShift or middleware and IT management tools to create a “single pane of glass.” Teams and administrators rely on this unified dashboard to view their applications, networks and systems.

Today, hybrid cloud architecture has expanded beyond physical connectivity and cloud migration to offer a flexible, secure and cost-effective environment that supports the portability and automated deployment of workloads across multiple environments. This feature enables an organization to meet its technical and business objectives more effectively and cost-efficiently than with a public or private cloud alone. For instance, a hybrid cloud environment is ideal for DevOps and other teams to develop and test web applications. This frees organizations from purchasing and expanding the on-premises physical hardware needed to run application testing, offering faster time to market. Once a team has developed an application in the public cloud, they can move it to a private cloud environment based on business needs or security factors.

A public cloud also allows companies to quickly scale resources in response to unplanned spikes in traffic without impacting private cloud workloads, a feature known as cloud bursting. Streaming channels such as Amazon use cloud bursting to support the increased viewership traffic when they start new shows.

Types of Cloud Services

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)

Rent IT infrastructure like servers, storage, and networks on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provides on-demand access to fundamental computing resources—physical and virtual servers, networking and storage—over the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis.

IaaS enables users to scale and shrink resources on an as-needed basis, reducing the need for high up-front capital expenditures or unnecessary on-premises or “owned” infrastructure and for overbuying resources to accommodate periodic spikes in usage.

PaaS (Platform as a Service)

Provides an environment for developing, testing, and deploying applications without managing infrastructure.

Platform as a service (PaaS) provides software developers with an on-demand platform—hardware, complete software stack, infrastructure and development tools—for running, developing and managing applications without the cost, complexity and inflexibility of maintaining that platform on-premises.

With PaaS, the cloud provider hosts everything at their data center. These include servers, networks, storage, operating system software, middleware and databases. Developers simply pick from a menu to spin up servers and environments they need to run, build, test, deploy, maintain, update and scale applications.

Today, PaaS is typically built around containers, a virtualized compute model one step removed from virtual servers. Containers virtualize the operating system, enabling developers to package the application with only the operating system services it needs to run on any platform without modification and the need for middleware.

Red Hat® OpenShift® is a popular PaaS built around Docker containers and Kubernetes, an open source container orchestration solution that automates cloud deployment, scaling, load balancing and more for container-based applications.

SaaS (Software as a Service)

Delivers software applications over the internet, managed by the provider and accessed via web browsers.

Software as a service (SaaS), also known as cloud-based software or cloud applications, is interactive application software hosted in the cloud. Users access SaaS through a web browser, a dedicated desktop client or an application programming interface (API) that integrates with a desktop or mobile operating system. Cloud service providers offer SaaS based on a monthly or annual subscription fee. They can also provide these services through pay-per-usage pricing.

Automatic upgrades: With SaaS, users have access to new features when the cloud service provider adds them without having to orchestrate an on-premises upgrade.

Protection from data loss: Because SaaS stores application data in the cloud with the application, users don’t lose data if their device crashes or breaks.

SaaS is the primary delivery model for most commercial software today. Hundreds of SaaS solutions exist, from focused industry and broad administrative (for example, Salesforce) to robust enterprise database and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven software tools.

Serverless Computing

Focuses on building applications without managing servers, using event-driven and scalable architectures.

Serverless computing, or simply serverless, is a cloud computing model that offloads all the back-end infrastructure management tasks, including provisioning, scaling, scheduling and patching, to the cloud provider. This capability frees developers to focus all their time and effort on the code and business logic specific to their applications.

Moreover, serverless runs application code on a per-request basis only and automatically scales the supporting infrastructure up and down in response to the number of requests. With serverless, customers pay only for the resources used when the application runs; they never pay for idle capacity.

Function as a service (FaaS) is often confused with serverless computing when, in fact, it’s a subset of serverless. FaaS allows developers to run portions of application code (called functions) in response to specific events. Everything besides the code—physical hardware, virtual machine (VM), operating system and web server software management—is provisioned automatically by the cloud service provider in real-time as the code runs and is spun back down once the execution is complete. Billing starts when execution starts and stops when execution stops.

3 Cloud Computing Components

1. Data centers provided by cloud service provider (CSP)

CSPs own and operate remote data centers that house physical or bare metal servers, cloud storage systems and other physical hardware that create the underlying infrastructure and provide the physical foundation for cloud computing.

2. Networking Capabilities

In cloud computing, high-speed networking connections are crucial. Typically, an internet connection known as a wide-area network (WAN) connects front-end users (client-side interface made visible through web-enabled devices) with back-end functions (data centers and cloud-based applications and services).

Other advanced cloud computing networking technologies, including load balancers, content delivery networks (CDNs) and software-defined networking (SDN), are also incorporated to help ensure data flows quickly, easily and securely between front-end users and back-end resources.

3. Virtualization

Cloud computing relies heavily on the virtualization of IT infrastructure (servers, operating system software, networking) that’s abstracted by using special software so that it can be pooled and divided irrespective of physical hardware boundaries.

For example, a single hardware server can be divided into multiple virtual servers. Virtualization enables cloud service providers to make maximum use of their data center resources.