- ✓Cloud computing provides on-demand access to computing resources including servers, storage, databases, networking and software over the internet, enabling organisations to scale rapidly without large upfront infrastructure investments.
- ✓The three main service models (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) represent different levels of abstraction and control, with IaaS giving the most control and responsibility to the customer and SaaS the least.
- ✓The four main deployment models (public, private, hybrid and multi-cloud) offer different configurations of shared and dedicated infrastructure, each with distinct implications for cost, control, security and compliance.
- ✓The economic model of cloud computing, paying only for what you use and scaling up or down as needed, has fundamentally changed how organisations think about technology investment and capacity planning.
- ✓Cloud literacy, the ability to understand, evaluate and work with cloud services at both a conceptual and practical level, is now a baseline expectation for most digital technology roles and is worth developing early in your career.
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Start learning →Alex: Welcome back to HTQ Digital Technologies: The Study Podcast. I'm Alex, and today Sam and I are starting Unit 6, which is about cloud fundamentals. This is one of those areas where the terminology can be quite dense, so let's build it up carefully. Sam, where do we start?
Sam: We start with what cloud computing actually is, because behind the jargon it's quite a straightforward concept. Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services, including servers, storage, databases, networking, software and analytics, over the internet, on a pay-as-you-use basis, from a pool of resources managed by a provider. Instead of owning and running your own data centre, you rent capacity from someone else's.
Alex: Why has this become so dominant so quickly?
Sam: Several converging reasons. Economically, the cloud model converts large capital expenditures into operational expenditures, which is more attractive from an accounting perspective and dramatically reduces the upfront investment needed to scale. Operationally, it removes the burden of managing physical infrastructure, which is expensive, specialist and not core to most organisations' business. And technically, it provides access to capabilities, like machine learning infrastructure or global content delivery, that would be prohibitively expensive to build and maintain independently.
Alex: Let's go through the service models: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.
Sam: Think of them as different levels of abstraction and control. IaaS, Infrastructure as a Service, gives you virtual machines, storage and networking: you manage the operating system, runtime and everything above. It's the most flexible and most responsibility-heavy option. PaaS, Platform as a Service, adds a managed runtime environment on top: you deploy your application code and the platform handles everything beneath. Examples include Heroku and Google App Engine. SaaS, Software as a Service, is a complete application delivered over the internet: you use it but manage nothing of the underlying infrastructure. Gmail and Salesforce are SaaS.
Alex: And the deployment models: public, private and hybrid cloud.
Sam: Public cloud is infrastructure shared among multiple customers, managed entirely by a provider like AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. It's the most cost-effective and scalable option for most workloads. Private cloud is infrastructure dedicated to a single organisation, either hosted on-premises or in a dedicated hosted facility. It offers more control and can meet stricter compliance requirements. Hybrid cloud combines both, allowing organisations to run sensitive workloads on private infrastructure while using public cloud for less sensitive or more variable workloads. Multi-cloud uses services from multiple providers simultaneously.
Alex: What drives the choice between these models?
Sam: Data sensitivity and regulatory requirements are often the biggest factors. Industries like financial services, healthcare and government often have strict requirements about where data can be stored and who can access it, which limits the use of public cloud for certain workloads. Cost is another major factor, as is the organisation's existing infrastructure and skills. Most mature organisations end up with a mix of approaches tailored to different workloads rather than a single uniform strategy.
Alex: Excellent foundation for the rest of this unit. Thanks, Sam. We'll look at designing a cloud deployment model next.