What is a Cloud Service Provider?
A cloud service provider manages your computing infrastructure, storage and applications on the cloud. You gain access to your data and applications on the cloud with ease over the Internet. Before the advent of the cloud, most computing was confined to on-premises data centers. Building an on-premises data center involves a lot of upfront capital investment. The costs can increase over time. You will need to maintain not just the data center itself, but the facility and utility support systems used for the data center. By partnering with a third-party cloud service provider, you can get the same storage capacity and computing power as you would with an on-premises data center.
There are four main types of cloud deployment models: public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud and multi cloud. A public cloud is the most cost-effective option for smaller organizations and startups. If privacy and speed are a concern, a private cloud may be the better option, but it may cost you dearly. To get the best of both worlds, you can consider a hybrid cloud or multi cloud model. A hybrid cloud model gives you a mix of both the public and private cloud. A multi cloud model allows you to select the best features from different public clouds. For example, some public clouds are optimized for storage capacity, while others are optimized for processing data-intensive workloads. A multi cloud allows you to pick and choose the features that will help grow your business.
With a cloud service provider, you only pay for the computing and storage services that you need. Cloud service providers typically offer three main cloud service delivery models: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. You can select the type of service model that works best for your company or business.
With IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), you own and manage the software components of the cloud infrastructure. The hardware components are managed by the cloud service provider.
With PaaS (Platform as a Service), you own and manage the applications that run on the software components of the cloud infrastructure. The software and hardware components are managed by the cloud service provider.
With SaaS (Software as a Service), you access the application via the internet. The applications, software and hardware components are managed by the cloud service provider.
With a service agreement with a cloud service provider, you can easily spin up additional cloud services. Adding cloud services essentially means adding virtual machines to your cloud infrastructure. You may find that once on the cloud, you may be surprised by how much you need to increase the footprint of your cloud infrastructure to get the level of performance you were used to on-premises. This is because the public cloud is shared by design. Cloud service providers throttle speeds for the benefit of all users. Using a private cloud may give you the performance you need, but at a cost that will eat away at your bottom line.
What if there was a way to get the most out of your cloud service provider without breaking the bank?
Enter Silk!
Cloud Optimization with Silk
Regardless of your cloud service provider, Silk supercharges your cloud computing experience. The Silk DB Virtualization Platform sits between the underlying cloud infrastructure and your data, workloads and applications. With Silk, you gain 10x faster performance compared to the native cloud alone. This can be done without the need to refactor or rewrite your specialized workloads and applications. Silk allows you to simply lift and shift workloads onto your cloud deployment model of choice.
Silk also offers a range of enterprise data services such as zero-footprint snapshots, data deduplication, and thin provisioning. These services help to reduce your data footprint on the cloud, reducing the amount of cloud resources that you need. In turn, this helps to minimize your cloud bill since you no longer have to worry about too many snapshots (backup copies) ballooning through your allocated cloud resources.
Silk is always on and available, so you never need to worry about not having access to your data once you deploy your data to the cloud.
Cloud Service Provider FAQs
What are the three major cloud service providers?
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are the three major cloud service providers. AWS has been around the longest and has global reach. Microsoft Azure is seamlessly integrated with the wide suite of Microsoft enterprise business products. This feature may make it easier to adopt Microsoft Azure for more established businesses. GCP offers unique features, intuitive analytics and machine learning that may be attractive to high-tech organizations.
There are other smaller cloud service providers including Alibaba Cloud, IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud.
What services does a cloud service provider offer?
Cloud service providers typically offer three main cloud service delivery models: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Each service delivery model gives you a different level of ownership and management over the underlying cloud infrastructure.
With IaaS, you own and manage the software, but not the hardware. With PaaS, you own and manage the applications, but not the software nor the hardware. With SaaS, you don’t own or manage anything, you simply access your applications over the Internet. Each service delivery model has its pros and cons. With a cloud service provider, you get to decide the level of control and access you want to your cloud computing infrastructure.
