Page 108 - Cloud Essentials

Where office staff might be affected by SaaS offerings, an organization’s

IT department would be involved in selecting and testing cloud services, as
well as ensuring reliable network connections to cloud providers.
Private cloud offerings are for the exclusive use of a single organization.
This type of cloud would run on company-owned computing hardware.
Cloud providers offer their IT services by way of virtualization, which
enables rapid cloud elasticity. The hardware and software required to
deliver these services are the concern of the provider, not the cloud
customer. A web-based management interface is provided for cloud

customers to add or remove cloud offerings as needed.
Because public cloud services are not exclusively controlled by the
organization using its services, there are inherent risks. Losing network
connectivity to the cloud vendor means losing access to cloud software and
data. The same is true if a cloud provider goes out of business. These risks

must be assessed and managed accordingly.
Successful cloud adoption requires a change to some organizational roles
as well as the ongoing reassessment of cloud computing. Skills such as
selecting cloud services that provide business value and selecting or
negotiating SLAs that map to business objectives represent roles that may
have had limited impact previously. Monitoring cloud services on an
ongoing basis is crucial to evaluating effectiveness.
Moving applications to the cloud might involve migrating existing on-

premises virtual machines to a cloud provider or building new virtual
machines in the cloud. For SaaS, selecting a new yet functionally similar
product can be an effective strategy.

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