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What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is renting it out! Instead of buying all the resources and maintaining them, making sure the backups are in place and everything keeps running even when failures happen, you rent it out to someone who will take care of the backend, while you can bother about everything else! Just few years back, we would buy pen drives, hard drives for storing our photos, our data, but things have changed now! Most of us take subscriptions from either Google Photos or iPhotos to store our photos or videos! The amount of data that has increased in recent years has given the world of cloud computing a boost for sure!

This is more at personal level. If we consider at organization level, earlier organisations would have huge server rooms, lots of computers, virtual machines, and a team to take care of! They would have to update these systems time to time, maintain them, and take the back seat when catastrophic events took place. When more and more data started generating, and the coming of website and apps took place, the shift of businesses from maintaining these systems, went into understanding their data, and their business, to make sure they take better business decisions. They shifted towards deploying a new app and new features every few weeks or months, to work through business continuity. This is when the cloud providers stepped in.

Renting out the infrastructure from the cloud providers, provided companies an edge where they could now focus more on their applications and data, without having to worry about maintaining the systems.

Computing services include common IT infrastructure such as virtual machines, storage, databases, and networking. In recent times, cloud service providers also offer services that include IoT and machine learning among other new advance technologies.

THE SHARED RESPONSIBILITY MODEL

This model basically means that you are dividing the responsibilities of holding up a data centre and running an application or database, with your cloud service provider. There are certain things that the cloud provider will take care of and then certain that you need to, kind of a handshake deal! Depending on who deals with what, there are models created, however there are certain things that are always going to be the responsibility of the either one!

Owner will always be responsible for –

• The information and the data stored in the cloud
• Devices that are allowed to connect with your cloud
• The accounts and identities of people, services and devices of your organization.

Cloud provider will always be responsible for –

• the physical data center
• The physical network
• The physical host

The model that you choose decides the responsibility for –

• Operating systems
• network control
• applications
• identity and infrastructure

Microsoft Documentation describes here a diagram distinguishing the models. For the shared responsibilities we have three models –

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS)
3. Software as a Service (SaaS)

Foolishly Yours,
Avantika