How Your Business Can Take Advantage of the Cloud

The cloud has proven exceptionally useful to businesses in a variety of ways, as it offers a means for these businesses to continue accessing their crucial tools and solutions. Let’s examine a few utilities that your organization could receive via cloud services, and how they would benefit your processes.

How the Cloud is Deployed

For our purposes, there are three cloud deployments that a business may utilize:

• Private Cloud—where a sole business owns and utilizes space in a cloud infrastructure.
• Public Cloud—where a business utilizes space along with other users and businesses in a shared cloud infrastructure.
• Hybrid Cloud—where a business uses a combination of privately-owned cloud space and public cloud space in tandem.

Based upon the individual needs of a business, any of these cloud deployments may be the best option for them.

Some of the Cloud’s Service Models

The cloud can also be used to fulfill a business’ various technology requirements, generally provided “as-a-Service.” Based on that business’ circumstances, they may subscribe to:

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

When a business subscribes to IaaS, they are effectively relying on their cloud provider to maintain the hardware necessary for the whatever software the business wishes to host. The IaaS provider makes sure that the physical machines work, so that a business can use the provider’s hardware to host and manage these machines for their own purposes. This commonly includes hosting their operating system, applications, and storage needs in the cloud.

If your business leases cloud storage space, data center space, or maintains a cloud-hosted backup and disaster recovery solution, you are utilizing cloud resources as a part of an IaaS deployment.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

SaaS enables a business access to various software solutions that are hosted on a provider’s infrastructure, rather than the business maintaining the software themselves. In this arrangement, the cloud provider delivers the tools that a business needs while managing their upkeep. This essentially gives a business the solutions it needs without most of the associated responsibilities.

If you are at all familiar with Desktop-as-a-Service or Machine-Learning-as-a-Service, or have ever used G Suite or Office 365, you have some experience with SaaS solutions.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

PaaS enables a business to develop and manage a proprietary application without the need to build and manage the infrastructure that would usually be required to do so. In many ways, PaaS is itself a hybrid of IaaS and SaaS.

Whatever your individual requirements are for your cloud computing, SCW is here to help you make the right choice and successfully carry it out. To learn more, reach out to our team by calling (509) 534-1530.