What is cloud computing?

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

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

• 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 the cloud delivery model for
their on-premises infrastructure so they can realize maximum utilization and cost
savings vs. traditional IT infrastructure and offer the same self-service and agility to
their end-users.

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 Gmail or
Salesforce, streaming media like Netflix, or cloud file storage like Dropbox. Industry
analyst Gartner projected recently that worldwide end-user public cloud spending to reach
nearly USD 600 billion in 2023 (link resides outside ibm.com).
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.

SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)

SaaS—also known as cloud-based software or cloud applications—is application software

that’s hosted in the cloud, and that users access via a web browser, a dedicated desktop
client, or an API that integrates with a 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, users 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 SaaS stores application data in the cloud with
the application, users don’t lose data if their 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.

Learn more about SaaS

PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)

PaaS provides software developers with on-demand platform—hardware, complete

software stack, infrastructure, and even development tools—for running, developing, and
managing applications without the cost, complexity, and inflexibility of maintaining that
platform on-premises.

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

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

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
offloads all the backend infrastructure management tasks–provisioning, scaling,
scheduling, patching—to the cloud provider, freeing developers to focus all their time and
effort on the code and business logic specific to their applications.

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 of
requests. With serverless, customers pay only for the resources being used when the
application is running—they never pay for idle capacity.

FaaS, or Function-as-a-Service, is often confused with serverless computing when, in fact,

it's a subset of 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

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
and development platforms—available to users over the public internet. These resources
might be accessible for free, or access might be sold according to subscription-based or
pay-per-usage pricing models.

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
typically provides high-bandwidth network connectivity to ensure high performance and
rapid access to applications and data.

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.

Many enterprises are moving portions of their computing infrastructure to the public 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. Others choose
private cloud because their workloads deal with confidential documents, intellectual
property, personally identifiable information (PII), medical records, financial data, or other
sensitive data.
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 them within
a hybrid cloud (see below) environment whenever they’re ready.

Learn more about private cloud

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-efficiently than it could with
public or private cloud alone.

Learn more about hybrid cloud

Multicloud and hybrid multicloud

Multicloud is the use of two or more clouds from two or more different cloud providers.
Having a multicloud environment can be as simple using email SaaS from one vendor and
image editing SaaS from another. But when enterprises talk 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.

Hybrid multicloud is the use of two or more public clouds together with a private cloud
environment.

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

Hybrid Cloud Explained (6:35)

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.

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 its data
within the cloud—but it's also important to clearly define data ownership between
private and public third parties.

• 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.

• User identity and access management: Customer and IT teams need full
understanding 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.
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:
 • Big data analytics

• Internet of Things (IoT)

• Artificial intelligence—particularly machine learning and deep learning applications

For development teams adopting Agile or DevOps (or DevSecOps) to streamline
development, cloud offers the on-demand end-user self-service that keeps operations
tasks—such as spinning up development and test servers—from becoming development
bottlenecks.
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Resources
What is cloud migration?

Cloud migration is the process of relocating an organization’s data, applications, and

workloads to a cloud infrastructure.

Learn more
What is hybrid cloud?

Hybrid cloud integrates public cloud services, private cloud services and on-premises
infrastructure into a single distributed computing environment.

Learn more
What is DevOps?

DevOps speeds delivery of higher quality software by combining and automating the work
of software development and IT operations teams.

Learn about DevOps

Take the next step

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