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Q4 How Do Organizations Use the Cloud? 227

As its name indicates, JSON uses the notation for JavaScript objects to format data. It has
much less metadata and is preferred for the transmission of voluminous application data. Web
servers use JSON as their primary way of sending application data to browsers.
With this technical background, you should no longer be skeptical that the benefits of the
cloud are real. They are. However, this fact does not mean that every organization uses the cloud
well. In the remainder of this chapter, we will describe generic ways that organizations can use
the cloud, discuss how AllRoad Parts in particular can use the cloud, and, finally, discuss an ex-
ceedingly important topic: cloud security.

Q4 How Do Organizations Use the Cloud?

Organizations can use the cloud in several different ways. The first, and by far most popular, is to
obtain cloud services from cloud service vendors.

Cloud Services from Cloud Vendors

In general, cloud-based service offerings can be organized into the three categories shown in
Figure 6-16. An organization that provides software as a service (SaaS) provides not only hard-
ware infrastructure, but an operating system and application programs as well. For example,
Salesforce.com provides hardware and programs for customer and sales tracking as a service.
Similarly, Google provides Google Grid and Microsoft provides OneDrive as a service. With
Office 365, Exchange, Lync, and SharePoint applications are provided as a service “in the cloud.”
You’ve probably heard of, or used, Apple’s iCloud. It’s a cloud service that Apple uses to
sync all of its customers’ iOS devices. As of 2014, Apple provides 10 free applications in the
iCloud. Calendar is a good example. When a customer enters an appointment in her iPhone,
Apple automatically pushes that appointment into the calendars on all of that customer’s iOS
devices. Further, customers can share calendars with others that will be synchronized as well.
Mail, pictures, applications, and other resources are also synched via iCloud.
An organization can move to SaaS simply by signing up and learning how to use it. In
Apple’s case, there’s nothing to learn. To quote the late Steve Jobs, “It just works.”
The second category of cloud hosting is platform as a service (PaaS), whereby vendors
provide hosted computers, an operating system, and possibly a DBMS. Microsoft Windows
Azure, for example, provides servers installed with Windows Server. Customers of Windows
Azure then add their own applications on top of the hosted platform. Microsoft SQL Azure pro-
vides a host with Windows Server and SQL Server. Oracle On Demand provides a hosted server
with Oracle Database. Again, for PaaS, organizations add their own applications to the host.
Amazon EC2 provides servers with Windows Server or Linux installed.
The most basic cloud offering is infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which is the cloud
hosting of a bare server computer or data storage. Rackspace provides hardware for customers

Cloud Category Examples
SaaS (software as a service) Salesforce.com
iCloud
Office 365
PaaS (platform as a service) Microsoft Azure
Oracle On Demand

Figure 6-16 IaaS (infrastructure as a service) Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud 2)
Three Fundamental Cloud Types Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)