What are cloud service providers?

Cloud service providers are companies that establish public clouds, manage private clouds, or offer on-demand cloud computing components (also known as cloud computing services) like Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service(SaaS). Cloud services can reduce business process costs when compared to on-premise IT. 

These clouds aren’t usually deployed as a standalone infrastructure solution, but rather as part of a hybrid cloud.F

The best cloud for your enterprise depends on your business needs, the size of your business, your current computing platform and IT infrastructure, and your goals for the future.

In a modern IT organization, cloud service providers nearly always play a role in a cloud implementation plan. This may include taking on the role of managing infrastructure, software, services, or some combination thereof.

To get started, you’ll want to determine what services you need from your cloud to support your enterprise strategy. From there, you can evaluate whether a particular cloud service provider aligns accordingly.

An important factor to consider during this process is, what cloud technologies will you be able to handle within your enterprise, and which should be delegated to a cloud service provider?

Having infrastructure, platforms, or software managed for you can free your business to serve your clients, be more efficient in overall operations, and improve or expand your development operations (DevOps) strategy.

Many public cloud service providers have a set of standard support contracts that include validating active software subscriptions, resolving issues, maintaining security, and deploying patches. Managed cloud service providers' support could be relegated to simple cloud administration or it can serve the needs of an entire IT department.

Red Hat cloud computing services include hosted and managed platform, application, and data services that accelerate time to value and reduce the operational  cost and complexity of delivering cloud-native applications. This means that organizations can confidently build and scale applications with a streamlined experience across services and hybrid cloud environments while Red Hat manages everything else.

Making the decision to add a public cloud is difficult enough. Once you’ve made that decision, you shouldn’t have to worry whether or not the operating system your applications rely on will work as expected once you get there. 

Red Hat OpenShift provides a consistent application platform for the management of existing, modernized, and cloud-native applications that runs on any cloud. This allows you to run applications where it makes the most sense, without creating different operational models because of the host environment.