Cloud services

The first sense of cloud services covers a wide range of resources that a service provider delivers to customers via the internet, which, in this context, has broadly become known as the cloud. Characteristics of cloud services include self-provisioning and elasticity; that is, customers can provision services on an on-demand basis and shut them down when no longer necessary. In addition, customers typically subscribe to cloud services, under a monthly billing arrangement, for example, rather than pay for software licenses and supporting server and network infrastructure upfront. In many transactions, this approach makes a cloud-based technology an operational expense, rather than a capital expense.

From a management standpoint, cloud-based technology lets organizations access software, storage, compute and other IT infrastructure elements without the burden of maintaining and upgrading them.

Cloud services provide many IT services traditionally hosted in-house, including provisioning an application/database server from the cloud, replacing in-house storage/backup with cloud storage and accessing software and applications directly from a web browser without prior installation.

There are three basic types of cloud services:

• Software as a service (SaaS)
• Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
• Platform as a service (PaaS)