How Your Business Could Take Advantage of Cloud Services

As businesses have been allowed access to more advanced tools, the cloud and its capabilities have been shown to be among the most useful to operations. Let’s examine some practical applications of the cloud to see why this is.

Defining Cloud Deployments

For our examination, businesses have the option to use three different cloud deployments:

• Private Cloud — Space in a cloud infrastructure is owned and utilized by a single business.
• Public Cloud — Space in a shared cloud infrastructure is utilized by multiple businesses and users.
• Hybrid Cloud — Space is utilized in both a public cloud environment and in a business’ privately-owned cloud space.

Regardless of the type of cloud deployment used, it provides considerable utility to the businesses that embrace its capabilities. Let’s consider some of the ways that your business could make use of these utilities.

The Cloud’s Service Models

Using the cloud, a business can fulfill its technology needs and requirements through solutions provided “as-a-Service.” Some of the “aaS” solutions available to businesses include:

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

By subscribing to IaaS, a business retains the responsibility to supply the software, while hosting it on the hardware that the cloud provider supplies. This means that the provider maintains the infrastructure that your business relies on to host its assorted needs—like its operating system, storage needs, and applications—in the cloud. This can be seen when your business leases space in a data center or cloud storage, or maintains a cloud-hosted backup and disaster recovery solution.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

Alternatively, a business can also utilize the software solutions that a provider maintains on their infrastructure. This means that the provider not only takes on the task of keeping the cloud infrastructure maintained, but also ensuring that the software solutions themselves are managed and maintained. This is commonly seen in a Desktop-as-a-Service or Machine-Learning-as-a-Service, or in services like G Suite or Office 365.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

PaaS almost serves as a hybrid between IaaS and SaaS. Essentially, using Platform-as-a-Service enables a business to create its own proprietary application without any of the responsibility to create and manage the infrastructure that supports it.

However your cloud deployment takes shape, Directive can help ensure that it is ultimately a success. Talk to us today by calling 607.433.2200.