Cloud Service

A cloud service provides on-demand access to technology that is installed, run, managed and upgraded on a third-party provider’s system, rather than on a company’s own on-premise system. Rather than deploying, managing and upgrading technology on premises, enterprises can simply access a cloud service via the internet, paying only for the resources they need. Cloud services are massively scalable, enterprises can easily add or release resources to meet business demand.

While many IT resources are now available as cloud services, there are three types of offerings that are most commonly used by enterprises.

• Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions provide on-demand access to elastic cloud resources for compute, storage, networking and other elements of IT infrastructure.
• Platform as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions provide a development environment where developers can develop, test, run and manage applications.
• Software as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions provide access to cloud software that is owned, managed and upgraded by a third-party provider and accessed via the internet.

Additional services include Container-as-a-Service (CaaS), Data Center-as-a-Service (DCaaS), Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS), Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) and many more.

For IT teams, cloud service offers both advantages and disadvantages. Cloud services free teams from the routine tasks of procuring, deploying, managing and upgrading technologies on site. Cloud services make it easy to scale rapidly, deploy quickly and reduce costs.

But managing multiple cloud services along with multiple clouds can become quite cumbersome, especially as each platform has its own management framework and processes. Constantly toggling between multiple platforms adds considerable time, cost and risk to the task of managing cloud infrastructure.

The solution: a hybrid cloud environment with a common management plane and a consistent set of tools and operations that can simplify management of cloud infrastructure. That’s exactly what enterprises get with Dell Technologies Cloud.

Dell Technologies Cloud provides a set of cloud infrastructure solutions to improve management of cloud services and infrastructure. This jointly engineered solution combines a robust hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform (VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on VxRail), a cloud management/orchestration tool (VCF) and full-stack integration to provide a simple and secure path to a hybrid cloud. Along with a complete portfolio of consulting, deployment, education and support services, Dell Technologies Cloud provides everything that IT teams need to run, manage, automate and secure application portfolios across multiple clouds and cloud services.

Dell Technologies Cloud includes:

• A turnkey platform, VCF on VxRail, that provides a consistent infrastructure and operations in one complete and automated platform. With the Dell Technologies Cloud platform, IT teams can rely on automated lifecycle management, easy workload portability and streamlined operations, helping to reduce total cost of ownership by up to 47%. Dell Technologies Cloud makes it easy to run traditional workloads alongside cloud-native applications with consistent, seamless operations.
  
• Pre-tested infrastructure with deployment guidance. This solution, Validated Designs, offers best-of-breed Dell Technologies technology for storage, compute and networking that has been pre-tested for interoperability with VCF. Validated Designs lets IT teams build hybrid cloud infrastructure with independent scaling of storage and compute to meet the diverse demands of legacy applications and next-generation workloads.
• DCaaS. This fully managed, subscription-based solution accelerates innovation by providing IaaS cloud service capabilities at core data center and edge locations.
• Partner Clouds. Dell Technologies Cloud enables a seamless hybrid cloud experience by extending to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and more than 4,200 additional cloud partners.

What is a cloud service?

A cloud service is any IT service or technology that is delivered via the internet or a dedicated connection rather than being installed and managed on infrastructure on premises. Common cloud services provide software, development environments and infrastructure like compute, storage, networking and more. 

What are the benefits of using a cloud service?

With a cloud service, IT teams are freed from the responsibility of deploying, managing and upgrading technology on-premises. Cloud services also offer massive scalability, allowing enterprises to quickly wrap up or scale down as business needs require. Enterprises pay only for the services they consume; cloud services can help to significantly reduce IT costs. 

What are the challenges of managing cloud services?

As enterprises adopt a growing number of IT services and multiple cloud environments, the task of managing these diverse offerings and moving workloads between them can become quite challenging. As a result, IT teams may incur significant cost and added complexity, mitigating much of the value that cloud services provide.