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Q6-4 How Do Organizations Use the Cloud?

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 Falcon Security in particular can use the cloud, and, finally, discuss an exceed-
ingly important topic: cloud security.

Q6-4 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 hardware 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 Drive and Microsoft provides OneDrive as a service.
With Office 365, Exchange, Skype for Business, 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 2015, 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, pic-
tures, 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 provides 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 custom-
ers to load whatever operating system they want, and Amazon.com licenses S3 (Simple Storage
Service), which provides unlimited, reliable data storage in the cloud.

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

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