Pub. 4 2013 Issue 2

www.wvbankers.org 10 We have all been hearing and reading about cloud computing over the past few years. We have seen the various acronyms on various terms that assist in defining cloud computing. T he opportunity to lower our costs while providing certain customer services or achieving other bank information technology (IT) objectives is what usually captures our attention. However, what really is cloud comput- ing and what does that mean to a bank? Cloud Computing Defined. A textbook definition of cloud computing is a com- puting model that makes IT resources, middleware, and applications available over the Internet as services to business organizations in a self-service manner. Cloud computing is sometimes referred to as a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the internet. There are three characteristics with providing services through a cloud. One, the service is typically sold on demand. For example, it could be based upon the amount time, disk space usage or other units. Second, the services are elastic and scalable. The user company can easily scale upward and downward. For example, new users can be easily added or removed. Finally, the service is managed and maintained by a service Cloud Computing What You Should Know When Considering Cloud Computing Chris Joseph, CPA, CISA, CRISC, CITP provider removing a certain element of overhead from the end user. At the same time an element of control is also removed. Cloud Computing Models. Cloud computing involves the use of three different models. These models are: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Plat- form as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). IaaS is the delivery of hardware and certain software as a service. Some examples of hardware and software de- livered through an IaaS are file servers, network technology, storage, operating systems and virtualization technol- ogy. In this type of arrangement, the customer rents computing resources and typically pays based upon usage. As the customer’s usage increases or decreases, the amount they pay for the service is adjusted appropriately. An appealing factor in an IaaS arrangement for the customer is that they are not required to buy or install the resources utilized – the cloud computing service provider sup- plies the resources and essentially rents the use of them to the user entity. There are several IaaS vendors including Ama- zon Web Services (EC2), Rackspace, AT&T and GoGrid. PaaS is the delivery of an integrated set of software in addition to the infra- structure. PaaS allows customers to rent virtualized servers and associated services for running existing applica- tions or developing and testing new ones. Software developers utilize the PaaS cloud model to develop and deploy the software entirely in the cloud. The advantage for the custom- ers is they have no demand to manage and maintain the infrastructure. In addition, as in the IaaS, the user entity is not required to buy or install the infrastructure or the integrated set of software they are using. There are sev- eral PaaS vendors including Amazon Web Services (AWS Elastic Beanstalk), SalesForce.com, Google (Google Apps) and Microsoft (Windows Azure). Q Cloud Computing — continued on page 14