About UCSB Campus Cloud

Cloud computing, also known as the public cloud, the commercial cloud, or just “the cloud,” is a massive computing resource accessed via the internet. Cloud computing has five major components:

• Compute: Virtual machines ranging from small to extremely powerful
• Storage: Effectively infinite
• Networking: Connectivity both local and with the internet
• Data management: Databases and related structure
• Services: Special features such as streaming data analytics

Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Google are among the largest Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). They offer their computers, storage and networking hardware as a service, through the web, known as “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS). They also provide higher-level “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) on top of those basic services, such as data management and networking tools that range from operating systems to databases and many more add-on services. All these resources are maintained in secure data centers in multiple geographic locations. Customers access resources online, buying as little or as much as they need.