Cloud services are infrastructure, platforms, or software that are hosted by third-party providers and made available to users through the internet.
Cloud services facilitate the flow of user data from front-end clients (e.g. users’ servers, tablets, desktops, laptops—anything on the users’ ends), through the internet, to the provider’s systems, and back. Users can access cloud services with nothing more than a computer, operating system, and internet connectivity or virtual private network (VPN).
Depending on whom you ask, clouds can also be considered managed cloud services. Clouds are IT environments that abstract, pool, and share scalable resources across a network. Clouds enable cloud computing, which is the act of running workloads within a cloud environment. Clouds are a type of PaaS, since someone other than the user supplies the underlying infrastructure on which a web-based platform is provided.
Like all other IT solutions, cloud services rely on hardware and software. However, unlike traditional hardware and software solutions, users don’t need anything other than a computer, network connection, and operating system to access cloud services.