
Learn how cloud computing shifts IT from capex to opex, enables on-demand resources, scalability, cost optimization, and regulatory-compliant security in hybrid deployments.
Contrast traditional on-premises information technology with cloud infrastructure, where provisioning occurs in minutes and costs shift from capex to opex, enabling elastic, on-demand resources and global reach.
Assess cloud value by cost optimization, speed and agility, scalability, and risk reduction. Real ROI shows break-even in 12–18 months with 20–40% cost reductions, elastic scaling, and faster deployments.
Explore the 2026 cloud landscape, where multicloud and hybrid models dominate, cloud-native architectures mature, and FinOps governs cloud spending across service models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) for business strategy.
IaaS, infrastructure as a service, rents virtual machines, storage, and networking while you control the OS and applications. Use cases include lift-and-shift migration, custom hosting, and rapid development environments.
PaaS lets you deploy application code and data while the provider handles servers, OS, runtimes, and scaling, with examples like AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service, and Google App Engine.
Explore software as a service (saas) that delivers complete applications over the internet, accessible via browser or app, with vendor-managed infrastructure, updates, and security, while you manage users and data.
Apply a decision framework to select SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS by need, starting with SaaS and using examples like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and Azure App Service.
Study how AWS, Azure, and GCP differ and influence cloud decisions, highlighting AWS breadth, depth, and global reach across 200-plus services like EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, and VPC.
Explore Microsoft Azure, the second-largest cloud provider with deep integration into the Microsoft ecosystem. Compare services—VMs, storage, SQL Database, App Service—and hybrid capabilities for Windows, Active Directory, and Office workloads.
Compare Google Cloud Platform's data analytics and AI-ML strengths with competing providers. Learn why BigQuery, Cloud Run, GKE, and Vertex AI power scalable, developer-friendly workloads.
Compare AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud to identify service equivalencies across virtual machines, object storage, databases, Kubernetes, serverless, and data warehousing, and evaluate ecosystem fit and pricing.
Apply a practical decision framework that prioritizes strategic fit for cloud vendor selection. Assess ecosystem, workloads, expertise, geography, and budget with a weighted scorecard, acknowledging multi-cloud and FinOps.
FinOps fundamentals: foster collaboration, ownership, and centralized tools that support decentralized decision-making to manage cloud costs; embed cost awareness in engineering, allocate costs by teams, inform, automate, optimize, operate.
Break down cloud costs into compute, storage, data transfer, and managed services. Track waste and align spending with business value using cost dashboards.
Explore on-demand, reserved, and spot pricing to slash compute costs by up to 70 percent, and learn a practical three-layer strategy for baseline, variable, and interruptible workloads.
Right-size instances to match actual usage and automate stop-start schedules to cut compute costs. Delete unused resources, optimize storage tiers, and use auto-scaling for ongoing savings.
This course is a practical, non‑technical guide to cloud computing strategy for business professionals who need to make informed decisions without becoming engineers. It explains what cloud computing really is, how it differs from traditional on‑premise IT, and why the shift from capital expenditure (CAPEX) to operational expenditure (OPEX) fundamentally changes budgeting, planning, and risk.
You will learn the three main service models—IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS—in plain language, and see when each one makes sense through concrete business scenarios. The course then compares the major providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud), highlighting their strengths, typical use cases, and how to systematically choose a primary vendor using clear evaluation criteria rather than marketing hype.
A full module is dedicated to FinOps, where you will understand the main cost components (compute, storage, data transfer, managed services), pricing models such as on‑demand, reserved, and spot, and practical optimization tactics to avoid “cloud bill shock.”
You will also explore governance, security, and compliance topics like the shared responsibility model, data sovereignty, access management, and how regulations such as GDPR or HIPAA affect cloud decisions. Finally, the course walks you through migration roadmaps, hybrid and multi‑cloud strategies, common pitfalls to avoid, and how to build a compelling cloud business case for your organization.