This quote is very significant, not because it's by Steve Jobs, but the fact that it was adopted and accepted by him—that yes, cloud holds a huge value to him and eventually to his company.

We have been listening, reading, and thinking about cloud computing—but what exactly is it? Is it a supercomputer? Or is it software? Or is the supercomputer sent to the cloud at the height of 35,000 feet for better cooling? How well do we know what cloud is? And how well do we know what cloud computing is? Have you ever given a thought on the fact of what is cloud computing? Okay, so you may know what cloud computing is, but have you heard of Cloud Analytics?

We are going to discuss the same things in this chapter. So, if you consider yourself very naive in the field of cloud, don't bother about that, because every master was once a student. Before understanding cloud analytics, we have to break down the topic bit by bit. Cloud analytics is a combination of cloud computing and analytics.

To date, the industry has been focusing on cloud computing and analytics as separate entities. But now, as we are evolving and adopting new technologies at a faster rate, cloud analytics will the new wave. In the traditional world, organizations were building their own infrastructure. This framework/infrastructure included buying a huge number of servers, network wires, and cooling mechanisms, and then fitting them together.

Along with this came the headache of maintaining it with huge infrastructure and human costs. And upgrading the outdated hardware was a different challenge altogether.

So, before learning about cloud analytics and taking a deep dive, we will understand what cloud computing is and what analytics is.

Firms are assisted by the exponential development of cloud analytics to use a compute resource, such as a virtual machine (VM)—the same way we use electricity.

Cloud computing offers amazing benefits for users, such as:

• Self-service provisioning infrastructure: Customers can compute resources for any requirement. This removes the traditional need for IT administrators / IT architects to provision and handle compute resources.
• Flexibility to scale up and down: Enterprises can scale up and down as computing needs increase or decrease as demand varies. Due to this you are not required to do any massive investments in local infrastructure, which may remain active or inactive as per requirement.
• Workload resilience: Many times, superfluous resources are reserved for cloud service to keep the storage seamless across the globe. 
• Pay per resource use: To ensure people pay only for the cloud computing resource they expend, calculations are done at the absolute minuscule level. No overcharging, and bills under control.
• Flexibility to migrate: Enterprises can migrate certain resources to or from the cloud—or to different cloud vendors—as desired or automatically for better cost savings or better performance or to use new services as they emerge.
• Disaster readiness: Against the previous understanding that we need to invest in heavy hardware to have backup recovery, to avoid global outage we need global servers, which are now eliminated due to the presence of cloud platforms.
• Automatic upgrades, working anywhere, and increased collaboration: With cloud we are reduced with the hassle of upgrading the hardware and software. The only thing that you should be concerned about is your product and service. With cloud you also get an opportunity to work independently of the infrastructure, all you need is a system to connect to cloud and the internet. Thus, when you are not worried about upgradation and infrastructure you can collaborate with anyone and from anywhere.
• And the best part is, security: Cloud platforms provide you with the best security standards available in the world. Your code is secured, your data is secured, and your customer identity is secured. All you need to worry about is your product and how to build it.

Now that we have understood the basics of cloud computing and their benefits, let's see what types of cloud deployments we can have in enterprises.