How do cloud solution providers group resources and provide management?
Since 2011, the pioneering cloud service providers were Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. These three companies had and continue to make significant investments in cloud computing and additional service offerings. Each company has focused on certain core competencies, and thus, each has certain strengths that enterprise clients are drawn towards. Companies must assess offerings from all three, and even bring engineers and consultants from these companies into their meetings to assist in developing proof of concepts. After thorough assessments, one clear cloud provider usually becomes the clear best choice for that organization’s business needs. Sometimes, it requires multiple providers to meet these goals – and this is considered a hybrid cloud strategy and is becoming increasingly popular (Knorr, 2018).
After selecting a service provider, an organization must decide on strategies behind deploying cloud resources. Two classifications of deployment models exist – one examines the access rights of the provisioned cloud resources: are the compute resources accessible to the general public, or are they private to members of a defined group? This deployment example is split into public, private, and hybrid models (Erl, Mahmood, & Puttini, 2013). An example of an enterprise architecture would ensure that developers are fit into the private deployment model, end-user consumers fit into the hybrid model, and deploy public options for the general public, if applicable.
The other deployment method differentiates on the degree of responsibility the organization wants to manage themselves in the shared responsibility model.
These choices include Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS), and Software as a service (SaaS). An IaaS deployment model would split the responsibility almost 50/50 with the cloud provider, while a SaaS model would have most of the responsibility on the cloud service provider. Diagram 1 highlights the shared responsibility model and shows who is responsible for each technology layer. On the far left of this diagram is the on-premise option and indicates that the entire responsibility of the hardware and software stack rests on the organization itself. A strategy may include a mix in its project portfolio – some applications may need to reside on premise, while other applications, services, or data would fit in the other models. It is critical to understand the level of responsibility and how it fits with the company’s policies, SLAs, and compliance guidelines. These will be further discussed in subsequent sections.
Diagram 1: Shared Responsibility Model
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