flevyblog
The Flevy Blog covers Business Strategies, Business Theories, & Business Stories.
Management & Leadership Strategy, Marketing, & Sales Operations & Supply Chain Organization & Change IT Other




What Are Cloud Services and How Do They Help Business?

By Shane Avron | June 3, 2021

Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Cloud Strategy Template (42-page Word document). This document provides both an outline of the various sections you should include in a document which describes your organisations cloud strategy and extensive example content. The example content is drawn from a real world example cloud strategy for a mid to large organisation who have invested [read more]

* * * *

The concept of a cloud has firmly entered the lives of ordinary people. The need for local hard drives and other storage devices is no longer important. Business owners are increasingly turning to cloud providers to deploy or migrate their IT resources. In this article, we will explain what cloud services are, and how they help businesses to be one step ahead of competitors. 

What Are Cloud Services?

Public clouds are usually programs or platforms that operate on the cloud provider servers. The key function of such services is that a person can use the files from any device anywhere. Using these platforms is not only convenient but also safe. Even if your smartphone or laptop is broken, your files will not be lost.

Cloud storage is provided to the company for a certain fee and eliminates the need to purchase the IT infrastructure for data storage. This provides flexibility, fast scalability, and reliability for the companies. For instance, storing accounting software in cloud storage is much safer than on a local server, which may fail, be infected by the virus, etc. Besides, if you suddenly need to import msg files into Outlook, you will either use third-party software or OneDrive to transfer files.

Models of Cloud Services

There are more than 10 models of cloud services. The most common types are the following:

  • PaaS (Platform as a Service) – the customer gets a powerful online platform with different tools and services;
  • IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) – it offers the customer leased computing resources in the form of online infrastructure;
  • SaaS (Software as a Service) – the customer gets certain online software products.

Currently, the SaaS model is considered the most common in the world, as it is used by almost everyone who has access to the Internet. Everyone uses the products of this model without even realizing that they are located in the clouds. The SaaS model works very simply: programs and services are developed and maintained by the provider, placed in the cloud, and offered to the user through a browser or application on one’s PC. The client only pays a subscription fee, while the provider is engaged in updating and technical support of programs. One of the most popular cloud services of the SaaS model is Microsoft Office 365.

Microsoft Office 365

This is a cloud service that combines convenience and up-to-date tools for work that are distributed on a subscription basis. Microsoft Office 365 includes:

  • Business-class email on the Exchange server;
  • Sharepoint portal and public business card site with a simple page constructor;
  • Lync communicator, with which you can exchange messages, conduct video and audio conferences, display the desktop;
  • Access to the Microsoft Office Suite;
  • Place in OneDrive (1 terabyte per user).

So, cloud storage allows companies to store large amounts of data, unlike traditional servers and PCs. Choose the option convenient for you and enjoy the result!

Excel workbook
Serverless computing is a very specific type of cloud computing service whereby the service provider will run / execute specific functions when they are called and then shut off once the function is done running. No data is stored (hence serverless). It is possible that the functions transmit [read more]

Do You Want to Implement Business Best Practices?

You can download in-depth presentations on Cloud and 100s of management topics from the FlevyPro Library. FlevyPro is trusted and utilized by 1000s of management consultants and corporate executives.

For even more best practices available on Flevy, have a look at our top 100 lists:

These best practices are of the same as those leveraged by top-tier management consulting firms, like McKinsey, BCG, Bain, and Accenture. Improve the growth and efficiency of your organization by utilizing these best practice frameworks, templates, and tools. Most were developed by seasoned executives and consultants with over 20+ years of experience.

Readers of This Article Are Interested in These Resources

Excel workbook
This Cloud Security and Risk Standards Self Assessment helps you diagnose and address the following issues and questions: IDS/IPS traffic pattern analysis can often detect or block attacks such as a denial-of-service attack or a network scan. However, in some cases this is legitimate traffic [read more]

Excel workbook
The Cloud Migration Self-Assessment will make you a Cloud Migration domain expert by: 1. Reducing the effort in the Cloud Migration work to be done to get problems solved 2. Ensuring that plans of action include every Cloud Migration task and that every Cloud Migration outcome is in place 3. [read more]

Excel workbook
Save time, empower your teams and effectively upgrade your processes with access to this practical Cloud Center of Excellence Toolkit and guide. Address common challenges with best-practice templates, step-by-step work plans and maturity diagnostics for any Cloud Center of Excellence related [read more]

170-page PDF document
The "Deliver Business Value with IT" series provides a good overview and actionable material of the ways a CIO can provide valuable and effective support to your company strategy and leverages business model concepts to deliver business value from IT. Martin Palmgren propose an extremely solid [read more]