What Is Cloud Computing?
Cloud Computing for Nonprofits Executive Summary Written by Afua Bruce February 2020 What is Cloud Computing? Cloud computing can be defined as the rental of someone else‘s computer resources to provide services — applications, infrastructure, security, software, and storage. There are three main categories of cloud computing: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). CATEGORY INFRASTRUCTURE AS PLATFORM AS A SERVICE SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE A SERVICE Abbreviation IaaS PaaS SaaS Cloud provider Provides the server Maintain system software, Deliver software through an internet responsibilities hardware and a small including upgrades and connection; maintain system amount of storage and patches; tools to manage software and databases; provision networking software to hardware and software user accounts and provide security host applications Example services Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services (AWS) Office 365, Salesforce, Google Apps, (AWS) Elastic Compute Elastic Beanstalk, Heroku, Asana, Slack, Calendly, Hootsuite Service, Google Microsoft Azure, Cloud Foundry Compute Engine (GCE), Apache CloudStack, OpenStack Positives and Negatives of Cloud Computing The flexibility of cloud computing makes it attractive to nonprofits. As organizations grow or their needs change, rather than continually purchasing new storage capacity to support applications, by leveraging cloud computing, nonprofits can simply request additional space based on current needs and usage. As with all technology, however,
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