What is Cloud Computing?

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is the on-demand consumption of IT services and resources over a network. The main cloud computing benefit is that it relieves users of directly managing and maintaining the underlying resources, ranging from infrastructure fundamentals like compute and data storage, all the way up to complete applications. Cloud computing services are available through hyperscale public datacenters, on-premises in privately owned datacenters, or in hosted or managed settings.

How it works

Cloud computing works by allowing businesses to use their devices to access their data within cloud applications virtually from physical servers, databases and computers that are not on-premises.

Users access the cloud simply through the internet, also known as the front end. This includes using the client device, browser, network, and cloud software applications. The backend consists of databases, servers, and computers from the cloud host and functions as a repository, storing all the data.

A central server manages all the communication between the front and back end and relies on certain protocols to facilitate this exchange of data.

Cloud computing relies heavily on virtualization and automation technologies. Virtualization enables the easy abstraction and provisioning of services and underlying cloud systems into logical entities that users can request and utilize. Automation and accompanying orchestration capabilities provide users with a high degree of self-service to provision resources, connect services and deploy workloads without direct intervention from the cloud provider's IT staff.

What are the benefits of cloud computing?

The main cloud computing benefit is that it relieves users of directly managing and maintaining the underlying resources, ranging from infrastructure fundamentals like compute and data storage, all the way up to complete applications.

Here are some of the most common reasons why businesses are turning to cloud computing services:

• Agility - Rapid resource availability enables your business to better respond to changing market conditions and opportunities by innovating quickly and speeding products to market

• Elasticity - Increase and decrease your IT resources as needed to meet the circumstances

• Scalability - Grow your IT capabilities as your business grows, without disruption

• Simplified operations - The service provider is responsible for time-consuming, complex, and costly tasks such as maintenance, upgrades, and remediation, freeing you to focus on higher-value tasks.

• Business continuity - Cloud providers maintain uptime by investing extensively in resiliency and redundancy capabilities.

• Disaster recovery - When disaster strikes, providers restore services, applications, and data with little or no disruption to your business.

Types of cloud computing models

In order to begin your cloud computing journey, you must first choose the type of cloud computing architecture that your cloud computing services will be deployed on. These cloud technology options include public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and multicloud.

Public cloud computing

Public cloud computing services deliver IT resources and services (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) over the Internet to the public. Customers pay in increments of usage (for example, MBs, minutes, or hours) for the resources they consume. Resources include storage, CPU cycles, and bandwidth, as well as other services such as data transfer, load balancing, and monitoring.

Learn more about public cloud 

Private cloud computing

A private cloud offers many of the same capabilities and benefits as a public cloud, but it is owned by and intended for a single organization. The organization hosts the private cloud in its own datacenter or outsources the hosting and operations to a third-party provider (though in a single-tenant environment).

Learn more about private cloud

Hybrid cloud computing

Hybrid cloud computing combines elements of public and private cloud. A single organization may run some of its workloads on-premises, some in a service provider, and others in public clouds.

Learn more about hybrid cloud

Multicloud networking

Multicloud refers to the distribution of workloads across multiple clouds, be they private or public, as well as remote and branch offices (ROBO), service providers, and field deployments. This approach allows organizations to use the cloud that best meets their specific technical and business requirements.

Learn more about multicloud

Types of cloud computing services

The three main types of cloud computing services are Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

Cloud computing services are available through hyperscale public data centers, on-premises in privately owned data centers, or in hosted or managed settings. Many organizations use some combination of all three, taking a hybrid multicloud networking approach.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

IaaS provides users on-demand access to the foundational infrastructure resources needed to deploy and run software. These resources typically include compute, storage, operating system, virtualization, and networking, although some providers offer database and message queuing services as well. It’s akin to having a virtualized datacenter in the cloud that users access via an API or dashboard. Users are still responsible for managing the OS, middleware, runtime environment, applications, and data.

Learn more about Infrastructure-as-a-Service

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

PaaS provides the resources necessary to develop, test, run, and maintain software. This includes the infrastructure and the OS, middleware, development environment and developer tools. Users, often developers, access the platform via the web, and they are free to focus on the application rather than managing resources. PaaS allows users to deploy standardized or custom applications with supported programming languages, scripts, APIs, and tools.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

SaaS is an operating model where applications are hosted in the cloud. Users access the applications via the internet. The vendor manages the entire stack, including the application itself, and there are typically no downloads or installations required on the client side.

Uses of cloud computing

Cloud computing has only been around and widely used for the past decade or so, but it’s so ingrained in our day-to-day life we don’t even realize that we’re using it. Checking your email from your phone or laptop? Streaming a show from your smart TV? Checking your activity level from your smartwatch? Posting to Facebook? Watching a TikTok? Cloud computing is being used for all of it.

Here are a few examples of use cases with cloud computing:

• Create, test, and build new applications - Cloud computing allows organizations to quickly build, test, deploy, and scale applications for their needs or the needs of their customers with cloud-native technology.

• Backup and disaster recovery - Store and protect your data more cost-efficiently and at scale. Cloud computing allows you to store all your data offsite so it’s accessible from any location on any device even if there is a disaster.

• Stream audio and video services - Watch videos and listen to audio from any device, at any time, from any location.

• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) - SaaS allows organizations to update their software on demand to all their customers globally at any time.

• Analyze data - Collect, analyze, interpret, and share insights from all the data stored in the cloud to make better-informed decisions for your business with artificial intelligence (AI).

Cloud computing and security

Cloud security is an entire ecosystem of security solutions, cloud processes and policies that protect the data and apps that live in the cloud and is fully customizable to meet the needs of an organization. These security measures are important because they protect data and support regulatory compliance, ensure customers’ privacy, and set authentication rules.

Cloud security is important because cyber criminals are constantly refining and strengthening their cyber attacks, so organizations must establish a robust security strategy to protect against data theft, leakage, and corruption. In the past, traditional human IT security was efficient to defend against common security threats, such as ransomware. But in today’s world, security breaches are more frequent and harder to catch. Having a cloud security solution in place eliminates these threats, allowing businesses to harness cloud computing and remain secure.

Nutanix offers cloud security through the NCM Security Central solution. It unifies cloud security operations for workloads and data on any cloud type while automating incident response with intelligent analysis and regulatory compliance.

The future of cloud computing

Cloud computing is behind every business and technological advancement today, with its extended agility and scalability and is here to stay. According to the 2024 Enterprise Cloud Index, 90% of respondents are adopting a "cloud smart" approach to their infrastructure strategy – leveraging the best environment (e.g., data center, cloud, edge) for each of their applications. Given the pervasiveness of this approach, it is no wonder that hybrid and multicloud environments have become the de facto infrastructure standard. Furthermore, over 80% of organizations believe hybrid IT environments are most beneficial to their ability to manage applications and data. Most importantly, this is now becoming an executive priority, with nearly half of respondents noting that implementing hybrid IT is a top priority for their CIO.

Explore related articles:

• Why and How Businesses Use Hybrid Multicloud to Build Their Future
• The Role of AI in Cloud Computing
• How to Secure Modern Apps and Databases for Hybrid Multicloud Operations