The Cloud Makes It Rain Money: The Business in Cloud Computing - Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure - page 351

A major example is Dell, for whom multiple manufacturers produce and assemble
computer displays. Dell issues a model number for each display despite the fact that it
may not have actually manufactured it.
A white label cloud service provider sells its customers resources that they can, in
turn, offer to their own customers under their own brand name. The third-party com-
pany has control over appearance, administration and security policy, support, and
access to infrastructure.

Cloud Service Business Models

Cloud services bring immense benefits and cost savings to businesses. Cloud service models
help consumers organize their needs and goals in a coherent manner. Businesses can relieve
themselves of worrying about costs and return on investment (ROI) and just focus on the
actual task of doing business. They can test their ideas by designing and prototyping solu-
tions, possibly maturing them if they see a potential for growth or discarding them altogether
in the case of unmet targets.
In the following sections, we present well-known and emerging cloud service models
from a business perspective.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

In this model, the consumer does not deal with the infrastructure; instead, the responsibil-
ity of all the hardware is outsourced to the service provider. The consumer is charged on a
pay-per-use basis. IaaS is often utilized as a horizontally integrated service including server,
storage, and connectivity domains. While the consumer may deploy and run their own
operating system and applications, the IaaS provider is responsible for replication, backup
and archiving, compute resources, network, load balancing, and firewalls. Some of the
popular vendors and their solutions are shown in Table 12.1.

TABLE 12.1 IaaS vendors and their solutions

Vendor Solution/Product

Amazon AWS, EC2

AT&T Synaptic Compute, Synaptic Storage

GoGrid Range of cloud products: servers, storage, load balancers,

and network

HP BladeSystem Matrix