What are cloud services?

Cloud services are any services that can be accessed through the Internet and that are provided from a cloud computing provider’s servers rather than from a business’s on-premise servers.

Cloud services are seemingly everywhere these days, offering remarkable advantages to businesses of every size. But what are cloud services exactly, and how do they deliver benefits to an organization? Here’s an introduction to “What are cloud services?” that provides a brief overview.

Cloud services are any IT services that are provisioned from a cloud computing provider and accessed via the Internet. Cloud services may include things like software, databases, storage and other infrastructure.

What are cloud services designed to do?

Cloud services are intended to enable organizations to access IT infrastructure on-demand, quickly and cost efficiently.

What are cloud services potential for scalability?

Cloud services can scale dynamically, enabling companies to keep up with changing business requirements without needing to provision additional resources, invest in additional infrastructure or higher additional IT staff.

What are cloud services types?

Cloud services include three basic types of service:

Software as a service (SaaS)
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
Platform as a service (PaaS)

What are cloud services’ cost advantages?

Cloud services enable organizations to forgo capital expense investment in hardware that must be continually maintained and upgraded. By offering IT resources on demand, cloud services also enable organizations to save money by avoiding over provisioning.

Other benefits include:

Rapid scalability to meet business needs.
Fast implementation and quicker time to value.
Ability to access applications and content from anywhere.
Lower costs for infrastructure, energy and facilities.
Increased productivity of staff throughout the organization.
Improved security of information assets.

What are cloud services’ advantages for IT teams?

Cloud services enable IT teams to spend less time procuring, implementing, maintaining, monitoring, upgrading and troubleshooting IT resources, and more time executing on strategic initiatives.

What are cloud services’ features?

While the variety of cloud services is ever-increasing, cloud offerings share certain characteristics that include:

On demand access - cloud services can be provisioned by users at any time.
Elasticity – resources can scale up and down as needed.
Economies of scale – cloud services enable resources to be shared among multiple users to bring down costs.
Virtualization – cloud services use server and storage virtualization to quickly allocate resources.