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Cloud Computing

By: Sai Vennam

18 August 2020

Cloud

What is cloud computing?

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing transforms IT infrastructure

into a utility: It lets you ‘plug into' infrastructure
via the internet, and use computing Schedule
resourcesa call with an IBM
without installing and maintaining them on- who can
sales representative
assist you in finding the right
on premises. products to meet your needs.

What is cloud
Cloud computing?
Let’s talk

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Cloud computing is on-demand access, via the internet, to computing resources—

applications, servers (physical servers and virtual servers), data
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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.

Compared to traditional on-premises IT, and depending on the cloud services you
select, cloud computing helps do the following:

– Lower IT costs: Cloud lets you offload some or most of the costs and effort of
purchasing, installing, configuring, and managing your own on-premises
infrastructure.

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– Improve agility and time-to-value: With cloud, your organization can start
using 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. Cloud also lets you empower certain users—specifically
developers and data scientists—to help themselves to software and support
infrastructure.

– Scale more easily and cost-effectively: Cloud provides elasticity—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 take
advantage of your cloud provider’s global network to spread your applications
closer to users around the world.

The term ‘cloud computing’ also refers to the technology that makes cloud work. This
includes some form of virtualized IT infrastructure—servers, operating system
software, networking, and other infrastructure that’s abstracted, 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 providers to make maximum use of their data center
resources. Not surprisingly, many corporations have adopted Schedule
the clouda delivery
call with an IBM
model for their on-premises infrastructure so they can realizesales
maximum utilization
representative who can
and cost savings vs. traditional IT infrastructure and offer the assist
sameyou in finding the
self-service andright
agility to their end-users. products to meet your needs.

If you use a computer or mobile device at home or at work, you almost certainly use
some form of cloud computing every day, whether it’s a cloud application like Google
Let’s talk
Gmail or Salesforce,Cloud
streaming media like Netflix, or cloud file storage like Dropbox.

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According to a recent survey, 92% of organizations use cloud today (link resides
outside
Skip IBM), and most of them plan to use it more within the next year.
to content

Cloud computing services

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. However, there is often
confusion among the three and what’s included with each:

SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)

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SaaS—also known as cloud-based software or cloud applications—is application
software that’s hosted in the cloud and that you access and use via a web browser, a
dedicated desktop client, or an API that integrates with your desktop or
mobile operating system. In most cases, SaaS users pay a monthly or annual
subscription fee; some may offer ‘pay-as-you-go’ pricing based on your actual usage.

In addition to the cost savings, time-to-value, and scalability benefits of cloud, SaaS
offers the following:

– Automatic upgrades: With SaaS, you take advantage of new features as soon as
the provider adds them, without having to orchestrate an on-premises upgrade.

– Protection from data loss: Because your application data is in the cloud, with
the application, you don’t lose data if your device crashes or breaks.

SaaS is the primary delivery model for most commercial software today—there are
hundreds of thousands of SaaS solutions available, from the most focused industry
and departmental applications, to powerful enterprise software database and AI
(artificial intelligence) software.

PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)
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sales representative
PaaS provides software developers with on-demand platform—hardware, who can
complete
assist you in finding the right
software stack, infrastructure, and even development tools—for running, developing,
products to meet your needs.
and managing applications without the cost, complexity, and inflexibility of
maintaining that platform on-premises.

With PaaS, the cloud provider hosts everything—servers, networks, Let’s talk
Cloud software, middleware, databases—at their data center.
storage, operating system
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Developers simply pick from a menu to ‘spin up’ servers and environments they need
to run,
Skipbuild, test, deploy, maintain, update, and scale applications.
to content

Today, PaaS is often 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 without need for middleware.

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

Learn more about PaaS

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IaaS (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 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.

In contrast to SaaS and PaaS (and even newer PaaS computing models such as
containers and serverless), IaaS provides the users with the lowest-level control
of computing resources in the cloud.

IaaS was the most popular cloud computing model when it emerged in the early
2010s. While it remains the cloud model for many types of workloads, use
of SaaS and PaaS is growing at a much faster rate.

Learn more about IaaS

Serverless computing
Serverless computing (also called simply serverless) is a cloud computing model that
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offloads all the backend infrastructure management tasks–provisioning, scaling,
sales representative who can
scheduling, patching—to the cloud provider, freeing developers to focus
assist you in all theirthe
finding time
right
and effort on the code and business logic specific to their applications.
products to meet your needs.

What's more, serverless runs application code on a per-request basis only and scales
the supporting infrastructure up and down automatically in response to the number
Let’s talk
of requests. With serverless, customers pay only for the resources being used when
Cloud
the application is running—they never pay for idle capacity.
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FaaS, or Function-as-a-Service, is often confused with serverless computing when, in

fact,Skip
it's to
a subset
contentof serverless. FaaS allows developers to execute portions of
application code (called functions) in response to specific events. Everything besides
the code—physical hardware, virtual machine operating system, and web server
software management—is provisioned automatically by
the cloud service provider in real-time as the code executes and is spun back down
once the execution completes. Billing starts when execution starts and stops when
execution stops.

Learn more about serverless

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Types of cloud computing
Public cloud
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
Scheduleand development
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platforms—available to users over the public internet. These resources might bewho can
sales representative
accessible for free, or access might be sold according to subscription-based or the
assist you in finding pay-right
per-usage pricing models. products to meet your needs.

The public cloud provider owns, manages, and assumes all responsibility for the data
centers, hardware, and infrastructure on which its customers’ workloads run, and it
Let’s talk
Cloud

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typically provides high-bandwidth network connectivity to ensure high performance

andSkip
rapid
toaccess to applications and data.
content

Public cloud is a multi-tenant environment—the cloud provider's data

center infrastructure is shared by all public cloud customers. In the leading public
clouds—Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and
Oracle Cloud—those customers can number in the millions.

The global market for public cloud computing has grown rapidly over the past few
years, and analysts forecast that this trend will continue; industry
analyst Gartner predicts that worldwide public cloud revenues will exceed USD 330
billion by the end of 2022 (link resides outside IBM).

Many enterprises are moving portions of their computing infrastructure to the public

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cloud because public cloud services are elastic and readily scalable, flexibly
adjusting to meet changing workload demands. Others are attracted by the promise
of greater efficiency and fewer wasted resources since customers pay only for what
they use. Still others seek to reduce spending on hardware and on-
premises infrastructures.

Learn more about public cloud

Private cloud

Private cloud is a cloud environment in which all cloud infrastructure and computing
resources are dedicated to, and accessible by, one customer only. Private
cloud combines many of the 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. 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.

Many companies choose private cloud over public cloud because private cloud is an
easier way (or the only way) to meet their regulatory compliance requirements.
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Others choose private cloud because their workloads deal with confidential
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documents, intellectual property, personally identifiable information (PII),
assist you medical
in finding the right
records, financial data, or other sensitive data. products to meet your needs.

By building private cloud architecture according to cloud native principles, an

organization gives itself the flexibility to easily move workloads to public cloud or run
Let’s talk
them within a hybridCloud
cloud (see below) environment whenever they’re ready.

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Learn more about private cloud

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Hybrid cloud

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 single, flexible infrastructure for
running the organization’s applications and workloads.

The goal of hybrid cloud is to establish a mix of public and private cloud resources—
and with a level of orchestration between them—that gives an organization the
flexibility to choose the optimal cloud for each application or workload and to move
workloads freely between the two clouds as circumstances change. This enables the
organization to meet its technical and business objectives more effectively and cost-

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efficiently than it could with public or private cloud alone.

Watch my video, “Hybrid Cloud Explained” (6:35):

Hybrid Cloud Explained

  0:00 / 6:35  
Learn more about hybrid cloud

Multicloud and hybrid multicloud

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Multicloud is the use of two or more clouds from two or more sales
different cloud who can
representative
providers. Having a multicloud environment can be as simple assist
usingyou
email SaaS the
in finding fromright
products to meet
one vendor and image editing SaaS from another. But when enterprises talk your needs.
about multicloud, they're typically talking about using multiple cloud services—
including SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS services—from two or more of the
leading public cloud providers. In one survey, 85% of organizations reported using
Let’s talk
multicloud environments.
Cloud

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Hybrid multicloud is the use of two or more public clouds together with a private
cloud environment.
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Organizations choose multicloud to avoid vendor lock-in, to have more services to

choose from, and to access to more innovation. But the more clouds you use—each
with its own set of management tools, data transmission rates, and security
protocols—the more difficult it can be to manage your
environment. Multicloud management platforms provide visibility across multiple
provider clouds through a central dashboard, where development teams can see
their projects and deployments, operations teams can keep an eye on clusters and
nodes, and the cybersecurity staff can monitor for threats.

Learn more about multicloud

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Cloud security
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.

According to security software provider McAfee, today, 52% of companies

experience better security in the cloud than on-premises (link resides outside IBM).
And Gartner has predicted that by this year (2020), infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
cloud workloads will experience 60% fewer security incidents than those in
traditional data centers (link resides outside IBM).

Nevertheless, maintaining cloud security demands different procedures and

employee skillsets than in legacy IT environments. Some cloud security best
practices include the following:

– Shared responsibility for security: Generally, the cloud provider is responsible

for securing cloud infrastructure and the customer is responsible for protecting
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its data within the cloud—but it's also important to clearlysales
define data
representative who can
ownership between private and public third parties. assist you in finding the right
products to meet your needs.
– Data encryption: Data should be encrypted while at rest, in transit, and in use.
Customers need to maintain full control over security keys and hardware
security module.
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Cloud

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– User identity and access management: Customer and IT teams need full
understanding
Skip to content of and visibility into network, device, application, and data
access.

– Collaborative management: Proper communication and clear, understandable

processes between IT, operations, and security teams will ensure seamless
cloud integrations that are secure and sustainable.

– Security and compliance monitoring: This begins with understanding all

regulatory compliance standards applicable to your industry and setting up
active monitoring of all connected systems and cloud-based services to
maintain visibility of all data exchanges between public, private,
and hybrid cloud environments.

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Learn more about cloud security

Cloud use cases

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).

Anything that involves storing and processing huge volumes of data at high speeds—
and requires more storage and computing capacity than most organizations can or
want to purchase and deploy on-premises—is a target for cloud computing. Examples
include:
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sales representative who can
– Big data analytics assist you in finding the right
products to meet your needs.
– Internet of Things (IoT)

– Artificial intelligence—particularly machine learning and deep learning

applications Let’s talk
Cloud

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For development teams adopting Agile or DevOps (or DevSecOps) to streamline

development, cloud offers the on-demand end-user self-service that keeps
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operations tasks—such as spinning up development and test servers—from becoming
development bottlenecks.

IBM Cloud
IBM Cloud offers the most open and secure public cloud platform for business, a
next-generation hybrid multicloud platform, advanced data and AI capabilities, and
deep enterprise expertise across 20
industries. IBM Cloud hybrid cloud solutions deliver flexibility and portability for both

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applications and data. Linux®, Kubernetes, and containers support this hybrid
cloud stack, and combine with RedHat® OpenShift® to create a common platform
connecting on-premises and cloud resources.

Learn how IBM Cloud solutions can help your organization with the following:

– Modernize existing applications

– Build and scale cloud native applications

– Migrate existing on-premises workloads to the cloud

– Speed software and services delivery with DevOps

– Integrate applications and data across multiple clouds

– Accelerate your journey to artificial intelligence

– Leverage 5G and edge computing

To get started, sign up for an IBM ID and create your IBM Cloud account.

Schedule a call with an IBM

About the Author sales representative who can
assist you in finding the right
Sai Vennam is a Developer Advocate at IBM with expertise on Kubernetes, OpenShift,
products to meet your needs.
and managed cloud offerings. He’s passionate about connecting developers with
technology that allows them to be successful. As a hobby, he works on his home
automation using Raspberry Pis and serverless technology.
Let’s talk
Cloud
Twitter: @birdsaiview (link resides outside IBM)
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Blogs: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/blog/sai-vennam
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sales representative who can
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