A Brief Guide to Cloud Service Providers:

Sometimes referred to as a CSP, a Cloud Service Provider is essentially a company that provides the components for the purpose of cloud computing. The infrastructure for this usually includes a Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

CSPs make use of their very own data centres, in addition to computing resources for the purpose of hosting platform services and computer infrastructure for other businesses. In most cases, cloud computing services maintain a pay as you go pricing structure, where businesses are only charged for the resources that they use, e.g. a particular service or using up storage capacity. Where SaaS products are involved, the providers of hybrid cloud management can not only host, but also deliver their own completely managed services to businesses. Failing this, they can also act simply as a third part that hosts the application(s) or a completely separate software vendor.

Benefits Of Using A Cloud Service Provider

• Disaster Recovery – when it comes to disaster recovery, CSPs provide a service that is both very quick and highly reliable. 

• Scalability – based on business demands, it is very easy for a business to scale either up or down their own IT resources. 

• Flexibility And Cost – businesses only have to pay for exactly what they use thanks to the pay as you go payment model that is common with CSPs. Because of this, businesses no longer need to make purchases for IT equipment.

• Mobility – both services and resources that are bought from a CSP have the ability to be accessed anywhere in the world, providing that there is a network connection at the location that works. 

Challenges Of Using A Cloud Service Provider

• Cloud Security – where a third party is responsible for handling a business’s data, then there is always the very real threat of that data being breached or compromised in some way or another. For those businesses with very specific security requirements, they will need to use specialist security tools for the cloud – this is in addition to the provider’s one security tools.

• Hidden Costs – the use of a cloud service has the potential for throwing up high expenses, which were not included when calculating what the return on investment (ROI) would be. When it comes to terminating the use of systems that are kept on premises, there is a cost of doing this, as data cleanup and the writing off of assets is required.

• Outages And Performance – when technical issues, downtime, and outages occur at the CSPs end, it has the potential to render a business’s resources and data completely inaccessible during what are events that are critical for business.

• Cloud Migration – it can take a considerable amount of time to move data from and to the cloud. This can result in a business not having access to data that is potentially critical for their day to day business operations for an extended period of time – this could be weeks or, in the worst cae, months.