The new age of cloud computing is undoubtedly making a noticeable transformation in how businesses are run. In the coming years, all or most new technologies will be centered around cloud computing. So, not surprisingly, there has been a significant increase in spending on cloud infrastructure, rather than on premises.
The graph below illustrates statistics by Synergy Research Group for enterprises spending on Cloud, and Data Centre's . Clearly the demand of Cloud Infrastructure Services has overtaken Data Centre's as of 2019!
Cloud Services help organizations to keep in pace with their work, promotes more collaboration among employees, and a more productive environment. Services are available as private, public, and hybrid.
Private Cloud: The cloud resources are exclusively available to a single business. The services and cloud infrastructure are also hosted on a private network. And the software and hardware are only accessible to that single organization.
Public Cloud: The cloud resources are available over the internet. The hardware, software, and the infrastructure are managed by a third party cloud service provider. Many businesses together share the common infrastructure in a public cloud architecture.
Hybrid Cloud: When the organizations use the advantages of both public, and private cloud services for their work, it forms a hybrid cloud. For example: an organization using services such as email service on a public cloud, while some critical applications such as banking services is put on a private cloud.
As we know, Cloud Computing offers flexibility to upscale, and downsize the services on a demand basis. This gives organizations an opportunity to utilize this low-cost service, and grow their businesses. Though many companies find it cumbersome to move from traditional data center, and IT infrastructure model to cloud computing. Moving to cloud has become an important transition to keep up with technology, and innovation. Cloud Services such as server-less computing, and containerization will become a major influencer of success in this digital era. With that said, companies need to understand which cloud services would prove to be beneficial to them. Such as: the company’s IT services, business model, and type of infrastructure usage, etc. are some of the factors that will decide which cloud services are suitable.
Cloud Computing services have a vast range of functions, many companies use cloud for email, storage before moving entirely to cloud for advanced usage. With machine learning and artificial intelligence, the data on cloud is transformed to make intelligent decisions. The companies use ML and AI to identify customer shopping habits, and supermarkets make use of ML to predict what items should be placed on shelves, and to make marketing strategies such as coupons, offers and discounts.
Security of business assets, and sensitive information such as passwords is a major concern for organizations today. It is a foremost point of discussion when a company decide to use third party services. Thus, cloud service providers have exercised a strong control over security. They have security experts who formulate security policies, and implement high security measures on cloud services. The companies are hence, relieved of the security concerns, and can focus on their workforce.
Cloud Computing market has many big service providers. The major Cloud Service Providers of year 2020 are AWS, Rackspace, Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and many more.
The IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are 3 tier services offered in cloud. Below are some well known CSPs providing these services.
As cloud computing is being adopted by organizations, a trend of multi cloud environment in contrast to hybrid cloud has been introduced. While hybrid cloud focus on using a combination of public, and private cloud for different services, multi cloud emphasis on how organizations can use different cloud service providers to benefit their technical and business processes. The multi cloud is in itself another concept, using containers, and micro services from different CSPs.
It is understood that cloud computing is bringing agility in organizations. The customers demands are met in no time, leading to high client satisfaction, efficient business processes, and an increase in repeat business.