Cloud Services
What are Cloud Services?
Cloud services are application and infrastructure resources that exist on the Internet. Third-party providers contract with subscribers for these services, allowing customers to leverage powerful computing resources without having to purchase or maintain hardware and software.
Why use cloud services?
When you use cloud services, you are able to hand off managing infrastructure and focus instead on just using it. The provider you choose will support a wide range of activities that keep your business operating, such as application processing and exchange, storage, and management of your data. Using these services, your authorized users can communicate, collaborate, manage projects, and conduct data analysis, processing, sharing, and storage without needing your IT department to oversee, maintain, or back up the activity.
What are the benefits of cloud services?
- Scalability: Cloud services ensure optimal performance and cost-efficiency by providing the capacity to scale resources up or down in response to demand instantly.
- Flexibility: Businesses may more readily access and modify computer resources using cloud services, which increases their capacity to respond to business unit usage, shifting market circumstances and customer demands.
- Processing Speed: Private cloud systems operating model across your datacenters, colocation facilities or at the edge offer fast processing speeds that facilitate quick data analysis, application deployment, and productivity.
- Security: To guard against threats and breaches, cloud providers use strong security features, including encryption, access limits, and monitoring.
- Cost Efficiency: Pay-as-you-go pricing mechanisms and the absence of upfront hardware and infrastructure investments are two benefits of cloud services that make capital costs more efficient.
- Disaster Recovery: In the case of calamities or outages, cloud environments provide automatic backup, replication, and recovery procedures, guaranteeing data resilience and business continuity.
- Agility: Cloud services allow businesses to innovate and launch new services and apps swiftly, giving them a competitive edge and a quicker time to market.
- Reliability: Cloud providers ensure high availability and dependability for crucial business activities by providing redundant infrastructure and SLA-backed service assurances.
How are cloud services used?
The power, flexibility, and agility of cloud services has led to a myriad of uses, with more being invented every day.
Email: Perhaps the first cloud service ever offered, email doesn’t require any software to be installed on a local device to be able to use it. The application itself is hosted on the cloud—a SaaS use case.
Big Data Analytics: Big Data refers to the huge amounts of information that businesses such as Amazon and Facebook collect to understand human buying behavior. Now, most companies use their own customer data to make decisions on sales, marketing, R&D, and more. Using cloud services to store, manage, and analyze this data offers a powerful advantage—an IaaS use case.
Software Development: Because of the cloud’s flexibility, users can build environments, test them, and tear them down quickly. What previously took months to provision can now take just a few minutes, which is a perfect scenario for highly iterative processes, such as software development. With PaaS, developers do not need to bother with maintenance, so they’re free to concentrate on development.
Backup and Disaster Recovery: Using IaaS, you can access nearly unlimited storage space with built-in data lifecycle management policies. Using a deep data storage service, you can implement a data backup and archive process for any data that is over 30 days old. Just like that, as long as you have access to the Internet, you have access to the data no matter what happens to your facility.
Web Hosting: Organizations often use IaaS for web hosting so they can balance the traffic load across multiple servers and scale up and down quickly and automatically as traffic fluctuates. The ability to provision and implement automatic scaling simplifies the whole process and takes out much of the administrative input and maintenance required.
What types of cloud services are available?
The following are the three main types of cloud computing services available. In each case, the service providers maintain the underlying cloud infrastructure. Other computing resources can be handled by the provider or not, as required by the subscriber’s needs.
Software as a Service (SaaS)
Providers offer subscribers the use of their software running on a cloud infrastructure, which means the application can be widely distributed and accessed. Common types of business technologies hosted by the SaaS vendor include productivity suites, customer relationship management (CRM) software, human resources management (HRM) software, and data management software. Users have the option of accessing the application(s) through a program interface or a thin client interface, such as a web browser. With this service, subscribers are limited to access and use of the software only. The provider handles everything else: managing and controlling the network, servers, operating systems, storage, virtualization, data, middleware, and even individual application capabilities. SaaS apps are usually designed to be simple to use for a wider audience.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
With PaaS, users have a bit more control than with SaaS because users gain access to a framework from the operating system up. PaaS allows users to place their own applications onto the cloud infrastructure with programming languages, libraries, services, and tools supported by the provider. The subscriber has control over the deployed applications, data, and possibly configuration settings for the application-hosting environment. But the network, servers, operating systems, and storage are managed and controlled by the provider.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Using IaaS, subscribers can architect an entire environment by configuring a virtual network that is segmented from other networks. Within this environment, users run an operating system and provision the processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources needed to run software on the cloud infrastructure. With IaaS, the subscriber may also have limited control of select networking components (e.g., host firewalls). Some providers will also offer services such as monitoring, automation, security, load balancing, and storage resiliency.
Anything as a Service (XaaS)
There are several other service models defined as XaaS, which do not strictly fit in the above three categories. They are essentially anything as a service and are often limited to narrower offerings. Disaster Recovery as a Service, Communications as a Service, and Monitoring as a Service are good examples.
How HPE can help in cloud services?
HPE offers a wide range of cloud services that are intended to give businesses flexibility and cost-effectiveness:
- HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise: This HPE cloud solution, which is specifically designed for large businesses, offers secure, scalable private cloud architecture that enables firms to effectively manage and modify their cloud resources while keeping control over critical data.
- HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition: This solution offers a versatile and cost-effective private cloud service geared toward smaller organizations. It fosters development and agility by allowing companies to make use of cloud capabilities without requiring substantial IT personnel.
- HPE GreenLake: With a flexible consumption-based strategy, HPE GreenLake is a comprehensive cloud services platform. By enabling businesses to pay for the IT services they use—infrastructure, apps, and data storage—it encourages resource management and cost-effectiveness.
- HPE Hybrid Cloud: A seamless integration of on-premises and off-premises cloud resources is offered by HPE Hybrid Cloud. Businesses can combine public and private clouds to maximize performance, scalability, and cost-effectiveness using a hybrid strategy that works for your organization.
- HPE Application Modernization Services: HPE Services Experts, help in migration and modernization of apps transformation with determining the right hybrid cloud strategy for you through leveraging HPE tools and capabilities to make data-driven decisions on modernizing strategic applications and optimal workload placements, for faster business results through innovation and cost management.
- HPE Transformation Services - Edge-to-Cloud Modernization Program: The Edge-to-Cloud Modernization Program facilitates evaluation of your organization, identifies maturity gaps, and develops an actionable transformation road map to prepare people, processes, and technology for holistic edge-to-cloud transformation. The Edge-to-Cloud Modernization Program enables you to accelerate your cloud program and offers continued success by providing the analysis and guidance needed to define your structured decision-making, communications, training, standards, and expertise in the use of cloud capabilities.
- Hybrid Cloud consulting services: Build your hybrid cloud infrastructure with integration of private clouds, public clouds, and legacy IT environments. HPE Services can help you find the right mix of hybrid cloud and sustainable IT that can turn your organization into a valuable change agent for innovation and growth. HPE experts assist you with workloads management, governance and compliance, cloud cost management and optimizing operations.