5 minute read
Decoding Tech Jargon
from Solve Q2 2015
by ⌘ ⇧ ⌥
TECH JARGONA down-to-earth guide to the cloud DECODING
BY MICHAEL HAYES
Over the past few years, “the cloud” has been the most overloaded term in business, with different meanings for different people depending on the context. Here’s a basic vocabulary that will be helpful as you make decisions about which aspects of the cloud will have the biggest payoff for your company.
PUBLIC, PRIVATE, AND HYBRID:
A private cloud is a dedicated cloud ecosystem for a single customer, hosted in a customer’s own data center or a service provider’s facilities. It typically has a dedicated network connection. A public cloud is like the Amazon model, where virtual resources are shared; as an analogy, if the private cloud is a house, the public cloud is an apartment building. A hybrid cloud blends private and public clouds, e.g. a company may keep intellectual property in a private cloud and commercial applications in a public cloud.
SSAE 16 COMPLIANCE: Short for Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements, this is an audit standard referring to how service companies report on compliance controls. Such providers need to prove they can be good stewards of other people’s intellectual property by having precautions like redundant network connectivity; diverse paths for power supplies; huge banks of batteries; generators with days of available fuel; physical and logistical access protection; and so on. These security measures are more than a typical company would provide for its own servers, making cloud services from a reputable provider more secure than self-hosting data.
“AAS” TERMS. This stands for “as a Service” and is used to describe a vast range of rentable resources available for companies. Key terms are: • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), a base layer for the cloud providing generic computer, storage, and network resources; • Platform as a Service (PaaS), a purpose built environment providing the middleware for an application infrastructure; • Software as a Service (SaaS), in which a provider essentially rents out access to an application such as e-mail (for example, Microsoft Exchange) or CRM (for example, Salesforce.com); • Network as a Service (NaaS), a new refi nement of IaaS in which a company can access network capacity that’s more elastic and on-demand than a fi xed pipe; and • Desktop as a Service (DaaS), also known as “virtual desktop infrastructure.” Essentially, you’re renting desktop computer resources.
The operating system and all the programs and data your employees use are hosted in a cloud system instead of on the local physical computer. DaaS has obvious security benefi ts and doesn’t require high-end hardware—you can use it on a fi veyear-old computer or even a tablet.
MANAGED CONTINUITY: Business continuity and disaster recovery can be greatly enhanced by cloud technologies. In the old days, when companies ran their own data centers and computing resources, the prudent ones performed regular backups and maintained redundant resources in offsite locations. In case of need, however, it could take days or longer to get a company back up and running. In the cloud, a business can have fully redundant facilities that could failover from primary to backup, with no perceptible interruption to regular business operations.
CHECKLIST:
4 key elements for your cloud service
It offers robust authenticated access from anywhere. It’s elastic; resources can grow or shrink as your needs warrant. Billing is consumption-based. It’s hosted by an SSAE 16 compliant provider.
Michael Hayes is a product manager at NaviSite, a Time Warner Cable company that is a leading worldwide provider of enterprise-class, cloud-enabled hosting, managed applications, and services.
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