Cloud computing has been credited with increasing competitiveness through cost savings, greater flexibility, more resilience, and optimal use of resources. As a technology, cloud computing is not just the sum of its parts. It opens the door to cloud-native technologies, supports more efficient ways of working, and enables emerging capabilities in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).
Over the past decade, cloud computing has shifted from the periphery to the center of most IT-based businesses as well as in other industry verticals that are supported by IT-enabled solutions. Right from building infrastructure and platforms and software as a service to testing and developing applications, the cloud has been a favorite in the industry. Here’s a quick look at how companies are using cloud computing to drive business value:
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) delivers basic computing, networking, and storage resources to consumers on-demand, over the Internet, and on a pay-on-demand basis. Using cloud infrastructure as part of a pay-as-you-go system allows companies to reduce the cost of purchasing, managing, and maintaining their own IT infrastructure. In addition, the cloud is easily accessible.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides customers with complete cloud platform hardware, software, and infrastructure to develop, run, and manage applications that are inexpensive, complex, and difficult. build and maintain this platform on the site. Organizations may move to PaaS for the same reasons they switched to IaaS; they wanted to accelerate development on top of the existing platform and deploy applications with a predictable and cost-effective pricing model.
Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud
A hybrid cloud is a computing environment that connects an enterprise’s on-premises private cloud services and third-party public cloud services into a single, flexible infrastructure for running applications. and critical workload. This unique combination of public and private cloud resources makes it easy to choose the optimal cloud for each application or workload, and then freely move workloads between the two clouds as you go. circumstances change.
Multi-cloud goes a step further and allows organizations to use two or more clouds from different cloud providers. This type of cloud computing can include any combination of IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS resources. With multi-cloud, workloads can be run in different cloud environments to meet unique needs. It also means that businesses can avoid vendor lock-in.
Test and development
One of the best use cases for the cloud is a software development environment. DevOps teams can quickly create development, test, and production environments tailored to specific needs. This may include, but is not limited to, the automatic provisioning of physical and virtual machines. To perform in-house development and testing, organizations must secure a budget and set up test environments with physical assets. Next is to install and configure the development platform. All of these can often lengthen the time it takes to complete a project and extend milestones. Cloud computing accelerates this process with cloud-based development tools that make building apps and software faster, easier, and more cost-effective.
Big data analytics
By leveraging the computing power of cloud computing, companies can gain insights and optimize business processes through big data analytics. Huge amounts of data are collected every day from enterprise endpoints, cloud applications, and the users who interact with them. Cloud computing enables organizations to leverage large amounts of structured and unstructured data to leverage business value mining.
Retailers and suppliers are now extracting information from consumers’ purchasing habits to target their advertising and marketing campaigns to a specific segment of the population. Social networking platforms provide the basis for behavioral pattern analysis that organizations use to gain meaningful insights. Companies like this and many more can also harness deeper insights through machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), two capabilities made possible by cloud computing.
Cloud storage
Cloud data storage allows files to be automatically saved to the cloud, where they can then be viewed, stored, and retrieved from any device with an internet connection. Instead of maintaining their own data centres for storage, companies can just pay for the cloud storage they use and do so without worrying about monitoring maintenance. day-to-day storage infrastructure. This results in increased availability, speed, scalability, and security for data storage environments.
Disaster recovery and data backup
Another benefit of using the cloud is the cost-effectiveness of a disaster recovery (DR) solution allowing for faster recovery from a grid of different physical locations at a lower cost. much more than a traditional DR site. Building a DR website and testing a business continuity plan can be an extremely expensive and time-consuming task with capital assets. However, when built in the cloud, organizations can replicate their production locations and seamlessly replicate data and configuration settings, saving significant time and resources.
Likewise, backing up data is always a complex and time-consuming operation. Cloud-based backup, while not a panacea, is certainly a far cry from what it used to be. Organizations can now automatically send data to any location with the assurance that security, availability, and capacity are not an issue.
While these top seven uses of the cloud are by no means exhaustive, they show clear motivations for using the cloud to increase the flexibility of your IT infrastructure, while leveraging Maximize big data analytics, mobile computing, and emerging technologies.
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