Cloud Computing: Services, Benefits, Risks, and IT Professional Views

This discussion board post explores cloud computing, covering different types of cloud services like IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, and compares them with in-house IT solutions. It highlights the benefits such as cost savings, scalability, and accessibility, while also addressing drawbacks like data security, downtime, and vendor lock-in. The assignment also examines why IT professionals may be apprehensive about cloud services, focusing on security concerns, control, and data recovery. Furthermore, the greatest risks associated with cloud-based solutions, including unauthorized access, vendor security, compliance issues, and availability, are analyzed. The post utilizes APA style formatting and provides references to support the discussion, offering a comprehensive overview of cloud computing's various aspects.

Running head: CLOUD COMPUTING
Cloud computing
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author Note

1CLOUD COMPUTING
Different types of cloud services:
Firstly, there is IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service. It is a model where the virtualized
infrastructure is provided and managed for the business through eternal cloud providers. Then there
is PaaS or Platform as a service. Here, the cloud vendors provide computing resources with
hardware and infrastructure elements like operating systems and middleware needed to create and
test different applications. Then there is SaaS that involves PaaS and IaaS. The cloud service
providers provide the total software suite according to the pay-per-use model (Almorsy, Grundy &
Müller, 2016).
Pros and cons of choosing cloud service solution over an in-house IT solution:
The benefits are that there is no necessity of onsite capital expenses or hardware costs. The
storages can be included as per necessities. The resource and backup are initiated from any place
through smartphone, tablet and computer. The information can be backed up in the cloud with
regular internal as fifteen-minute intervals. The expenses of data can outweigh the advantage for a
business that is never reliable on instant recovery or uptime (Rittinghouse & Ransome 2017).
Further, the business has no limit to data that could be get stored in the cloud because of the
availability of storage and expenses. As the Internet comes down on one side, one never require to
access the data. Besides, the total recovery of data can prove to be highly time consuming and
influential to systems.
The reason why cloud services are appreciated by IT professionals:
This largely affects information technology costs and labors. There is no necessity of paying
regular wages to the professionals simply taking those services. This has been much more scalable in

2CLOUD COMPUTING
nature and provides secured and better storages. The safety, data security or protection is the main
issues at present and the cloud services provide the same. Furthermore, the effective and
collaboration of communication platforms are delivered. The best practices and flexibilities are
gained. There is access to the automatic upgrade for the IT requirements that are involved. Here, few
of the topmost cloud technologies and cloud services are delivered through VMware, Google,
Microsoft and Amazon (Marinescu, 2017). Due to the advent of virtualized innovations and cloud
services, there are demands for expert IT professionals who have come to the scenario in current
days. Because of that, there are various IT professionals actively searching for the skills and receive
validated with the essential IT certifications for those technologies. As one is at the profession of IT,
for future-proofing the profile, one must search the most effective IT certifications (Chang, Kuo &
Ramachandran, 2016).
The greatest challenge for opting the cloud-based solutions:
The risks are tricky in nature. One can consider the large quantity of that despite any result
till that gets much late. Firstly, there can be unauthorized access for customers and business data.
Secondly, there is a risk of security at vendors and legal and compliance risks. Further, there are
risks that are related to the lack of any sort of control. Lastly, there is the risk regarding availability.

3CLOUD COMPUTING
References:
Almorsy, M., Grundy, J., & Müller, I. (2016). An analysis of the cloud computing security problem.
arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.01107.
Chang, V., Kuo, Y. H., & Ramachandran, M. (2016). Cloud computing adoption framework: A
security framework for business clouds. Future Generation Computer Systems, 57, 24-41.
Marinescu, D. C. (2017). Cloud computing: theory and practice. Morgan Kaufmann.
Rittinghouse, J. W., & Ransome, J. F. (2017). Cloud computing: implementation, management, and
security. CRC press.