Cloud Computing best practice #6: Check out available Cloud capabilities

Every day, there are new kinds of cloud computing services and solutions . And for good reason: Cloud innovation is gaining momentum and shows no signs of slowing. This is exciting news for business leaders who understand the competitive advantages that Cloud can bring them.

Here, I run down (oh so briefly) six of  today’s leading Cloud capabilities. These are the most mature, the capabilities most tried and tested in the real world:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) — at the heart of any Cloud environment is a comprehensive, integrated Cloud infrastructure that exploits virtualization and autonomic management synergies and provides end-to-end security and virtual machine isolation
• Desktop as a Service (DaaS) — enables rapid deployment of desktops on virtually any device with the software, storage, and access that you specify while avoiding the upfront costs and complexity of traditional desktop virtualization
• Data Protection/Security as a Service — effectively identifies, monitors, and protects data in use, data in motion, and data at rest, and enforces policies to ensure protection
• Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity as a Service (DRaaS) — backs up your data and apps to a safe, highly secure remote location, provides highly available and reliable virtualized data storage with advanced replication and restore functionalities so you can remain operational throughout any disruption
• Messaging & Collaboration as a Service — voice, video, and conferencing services that enable real-time collaboration over a network between participants in multiple meeting formats, often with support for a wide range of other related capabilities
• Application Development/Test as a Service — an environment for developing and testing software where real-world conditions can be simulated without compromising day-to-day IT operations or incurring the cost of having to scale up your on-premise IT environment.

Next time: Cloud Computing best practices #5 and #4.