What is cloud computing? Everything nowadays is moved to the cloud, running on the cloud, assessed from the cloud, or may be stored in the cloud. So what exactly is the cloud?
Simply put, cloud computing, often referred to as the cloud, is a service that allows people to use online services that are generally available through any device with an Internet connection. This means that the user does not need to be at a certain location to access certain data.
From computing and analytics to secure and safe data storage and networking resources, everything can be delivered within no time, thanks to the cloud. The goal of cloud computing is to deliver these services over the Internet to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. Have you ever realized that you probably have been using different cloud-based applications every day?
What is Cloud Computing: Introduction
Whenever you share an important file over OneDrive with your colleague through the Web or use a mobile app, download a picture, Binge, watch a Netflix show, or play an online video game, it all happens on the go. The best part is it saves you a lot of money and time.
You don’t have to buy any machinery or install any kind of software. Everything will be handled by the cloud platform which is running these applications, whether it’s Google, Microsoft, or Amazon. Many such tech giants have already switched from traditional computer hardware to more advanced cloud architecture. Not just that, these companies are also the most popular cloud service providers in the market today.
As more and more companies undergo strategic digital transformations designed to utilize the power of the cloud, they need more It professionals and leaders with the expertise to extract the best business results out of their investments. So what are you waiting for? Buckle up and kickstart. Start your career in this domain by using Edureka’s expertly curated courses. Until next time, happy learning.
Types Of Cloud Computing
There are different types of cloud computing and we need to be able to recognize them. The first one is called Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS.
Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS
This is to provide the building blocks for cloud It. With this IAS, we’re going to provide networking computers and data storage space in its raw form. And using these building blocks, the old building Legos, we’re going to be given a very high level of flexibility and we can easily understand how we can migrate from traditional on-premises It to the cloud.
Platform as a service or Paas
Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS is the first service we’ll see in this course, which is going to be easy too. Then we’re going to get Platform as a service. In this, we’re going to remove the need for your organization to manage the underlying infrastructure and you can just focus on the deployment and management of your applications.
Software as a Service or SaaS
Now one step even further is Software as a Service or SaaS. This is a completed product that is going to be run and managed by the service provider.
Example of Types of Cloud Computing
So, if you want to compare all these things, let’s take an example. On-premises you’re going to manage everything. So your applications, your data, your runtime, your middle where the operating system, virtualization servers, storage, and networking.
And that’s a lot with IaaS infrastructure as a service, we’re going to manage the application, the data, the runtime, the malware, and the OS. But all the virtualization servers, storage, and networking are going to be managed by others, and in our case, AWS.
With Platform as a service, we manage even less. So everything from the runtime to the networking is managed by AWS. And the only thing we care about when we use the Platform as a service is our application and our data. And finally, if you’re using Software as a Service, everything is going to be managed by AWS. So how does it translate? Well, with IAS, we can use Amazon EC Two on AWS, but we have other services such as Google Cloud, Azure Rackspace, Digital Ocean, and Linode, which will provide us a cloud computing infrastructure as a service.
Platform as a service also exists on AWS with elastic beanstalk. And we’ll see all these services obviously in this course. And outside of AWS, we have Heroku, Google App Engine, and Windows Azure for software as a service. We also have this on AWS that represents many services of AWS. For example, recognition when we want to do some machine learning. But we’ve been using it as well in the real world with Google apps such as Gmail or Dropbox or Zoom for your meetings.
So the clouds have different flavors, but one thing in common is that the pricing is very different from what you know. AWS has three pricing fundamentals and it will follow the pay-as-you-go pricing model. So for the compute and that represents various services, we’re going to pay for the exact compute time.
For the storage, we’re going to pay for the exact amount of data stored in the cloud. And for the networking, we’re going to only pay when the data leaves the cloud. Any data that goes into the cloud is free. And this solves the expensive issue of traditional it because now we only pay exactly what we need, and so we have huge cost savings ahead of us. So that’s it for this lecture. In the next lecture, we’ll be having a deeper dive on AWS.
Advantages of Cloud Computing (Pros)
The Benefits of Cloud Computing cost cloud computing eliminates the capital expense of buying hardware and software and setting up and running on-site data centers. The racks of servers, the rounder clock electricity for power and cooling, and the It experts for managing the infrastructure all add up pretty quickly.
Speed Most cloud computing services are provided self-service and on demand, so even vast amounts of computing resources can be provisioned in minutes, typically with just a few mouse clicks, giving businesses a lot of flexibility and taking the pressure off of capacity planning global Scale The benefits of cloud computing services include the ability to scale elastically in loudspeaker.
That means delivering the right amount of It resources for example, more or less computing power, storage, and bandwidth right when it is needed, and from the right geographic location. Productivity onsite data centers typically require a lot of racking and stacking hardware setup, software patching, and other time-consuming It management tools.
Cloud computing removes the need for many of these tasks, so It teams can spend time on achieving more important business goals. Performance the biggest cloud computing services run on a worldwide network of secure data centers, which are regularly upgraded to the latest generation of fast and efficient computing hardware.
This offers several benefits over a single corporate data center, including reduced network latency for applications and greater economies of scale. Security Many cloud providers offer a broad set of policies, technologies, and controls that strengthen your security posture overall, helping protect your data, apps, and infrastructure from potential threats.
Risks or Disadvantages of Cloud Computing
Welcome to Cloud Security Basics, a new series where we explain the ins and outs of securing your application on Google Cloud. Sound fun? And stick around, because in this post you’ll learn about the second of three distinct areas of cloud security risk data.
Hello, Cloud Detective. You may have found protections for the first cloud security risk access, but how much have you thought about the second risk data? How can you prevent problems with the data you store? There are many ways to get trapped here by improper disclosure of your info by employees.
Imagine accidentally sending an email containing credit card or Social Security numbers your application could disseminate harmful data sharing phishing URLs, or malware. Or data can be stored somewhere without proper security protocols in place. What can you do to stop that? For your data’s sake, I hope you know the answer to my question. Okay, here’s what we know.
Data represents what data gets stored and where it’s located. You must be sure that you don’t store personally identifiable information, or PII, which is data that could potentially be used to identify a user. And even if you don’t store sensitive information, if you can’t find where you stored it, that’s not going to be very useful to you or your customers. Typical concerns here include something bad with the people who can access machines.
For example, a compromised employee accessing data they shouldn’t. Something bad with the data itself, like receiving bad data or storing illegal data. If the data coming into your system is junk, then even if every other component of data security is working as normal, the system still won’t function as intended. Sometimes unsanitized data can even be used to exploit a system to further compromise the application. Something bad with the transfer or storage of data, for example, not being able to find where data is stored. In this case, the cloud solution would be losing data, whether because it never got stored or because it got lost once it was.
Cons Of Cloud Computing
Either way, the result is that the data you need can’t be retrieved. Something bad with the machine data is being stored on, like it containing malware or if there were compromised VMs. In this case, even though the data is stored correctly, it might be leaked or accessed by the wrong people. Luckily, Google Cloud provides a lot of tools and services to protect its users, including but not limited to IAM for controlling access to data resources.
Encryption to make sure stored and transferred data can’t be read, even if it is stolen. Logging and monitoring to make sure that you can track what’s happening in your system. Did for making sure PII information is stripped before it’s ever stored in your system. Organizational policy to set rules on who can access what data and where it’s stored, and better VMs or VM management like Forseti or Google Host patching, et cetera. To make sure that the machines you use are secure, let’s see how they work. So how do we prevent problems with the data we store?
I just listed a few tools. I want to highlight a few of them. Cloud IAM lets you grant granular access to specific Google Cloud resources and helps prevent access to other resources. Cloud IAM lets you adopt a security principle of least privilege, where you only grant necessary permissions to access specific resources. This works to prevent people from accidentally or maliciously accessing data they shouldn’t.
For example, I’m could let you keep UI developers from accessing credit card databases they didn’t need to access in the first place. Say there was an access violation, though. That’s where logging and monitoring can be used to track who is accessing what and automate the information gathering and alerting process as much as possible.
Cloud Platform provides tools such as Google Cloud Logging and Google Cloud Monitoring that make it easy to collect and analyze request logs and monitor the availability of your infrastructure services. Like VM instances, these tools make it easy for you to create custom dashboards and set alerts when issues occur.
For example, you can set up notifications to warn you of suspicious activity in your system or to notify you when access to a resource is taking too long, for instance. But really, it’s good to be proactive as much as possible and set up the organizational policy.
An organizational policy is a centralized configuration of restrictions on how your organization’s resources can be used. They define guardrails for your development teams to stay within compliance boundaries and help teams move quickly without worrying about breaking compliance. For example, you could set a policy to require all newly created, restarted, or updated Cloud SQL instances to use customer-managed encryption keys. All of these tools and more work together to protect data.
And that’s it. I know the answer to Brad Actor’s question. Hello, Detective. I see you’ve been busy. You answered my little question. What if there’s a problem with the data you store? You learned that Google provides a plethora of tools to help customers protect data, including IAM, encryption, logging and monitoring, organizational policy, and more.
These features allow you to make sure only valid data is being stored, control who can access data that’s stored, and help you find the data you do store. Very good. You’ve answered today’s question. But be ready, because next time I want to see what you know about securing your virtual and physical hardware. So there you have it another post of Cloud Security Basics.
The next post will focus on the last of three distinct areas of the Cloud security risk platform. In the meantime, if you want to take a deeper dive into securing data in the cloud, then check out the article linked in the description below. And stay tuned for the rest of the Cloud Security Basics series. Because when it comes to security, you can’t let bad actors win.