What Is Cloud Computing?

Organizations are increasingly embracing a multi-cloud model, or the use of multiple IaaS providers. This lets applications migrate between different cloud providers or operate concurrently across two or more cloud providers. PaaS gives customers the advantage of accessing the developer tools they need to build and manage mobile and web applications without investing in—or maintaining—the underlying infrastructure.

When considering different cloud vendors, organizations should pay close attention to what technologies and configuration settings are used to secure sensitive information. Serverless computing is a cloud computing code execution model in which the cloud provider fully manages starting and stopping virtual machines as necessary to serve requests. The right PaaS offering also should include solutions for analysts, end users, and professional IT administrators, including big data analytics, content management, database management, systems management, and security. For most organizations, the current way of doing business might not deliver the agility to grow, or may not provide the platform or flexibility to compete.

This process is transparent to the cloud user, who sees only a single access-point. To accommodate a large number of cloud users, cloud applications can be multitenant, meaning that any machine may serve more than one cloud-user organization. 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.

Beyond the big three there are others, such as Alibaba Cloud, IBM, Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, that all want to be part of the enterprise cloud project. And of course, from giants like Salesforce down to tiny startups, pretty much every software company is a SaaS company now. Beyond this, the majority also remained worried about the performance of critical apps, and one in three cited this as a reason for not moving some critical applications. Our goal is to deliver the most accurate information and the most knowledgeable advice possible in order to help you make smarter buying decisions on tech gear and a wide array of products and services. Our editors thoroughly review and fact-check every article to ensure that our content meets the highest standards.

IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) 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 end 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. Public cloud is the classic cloud-computing model, where users can access a large pool of computing power over the internet (whether that is IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS). The cloud-computing suppliers have vast cloud computing amounts of computing power, which they share out between a large number of customers – the 'multi-tenant' architecture. Their huge scale means they have enough spare capacity that they can easily cope if any particular customer needs more resources, which is why it is often used for less-sensitive applications that demand a varying amount of resources. Security remains a primary concern for businesses contemplating cloud adoption -- especially public cloud adoption.

Cloud computing can also be thought of as utility computing or on-demand computing. An experienced cloud provider continually invests in the latest security technology—not only to respond to potential threats, but also to enable customers to better meet their regulatory requirements. Although cloud computing is only a different way to deliver computer resources rather than a new technology, it has sparked a revolution in the way organizations provide information and service. 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. IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) and serverless computing are the most common models of cloud services, and it’s not uncommon for an organization to use some combination of all four.

And video game makers are using the cloud to deliver online games to millions of players around the world. Moving to a cloud-hosted application for services like email or CRM could remove a burden on internal IT staff, and if such applications don't generate much competitive advantage, there will be little other impact. Moving to a services model also moves spending from capital expenditure (capex) to operational expenditure (opex), which may be useful for some companies.