How beneficial is the cloud for your organisation?

Two decades back, before major search engines were launched, would you have believed if someone told you that you’d have information at your fingertips, in the cosy comfort of your home?

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Fast forward to the year when social media websites/apps were released, and user-generated stories took on the world by the storm. You could connect and communicate with people, and information was stored on the server for everyone in your network to see. Today, the world has moved on from the local server and local infrastructure to a more virtual server and virtual infrastructure. Cloud has truly transformed how people share information, retrieve data, work in remote, and send messages to each other. With the cloud, the digital transformation was finally initiated.

For the uninitiated, we will take you through the basics of cloud computing, and the different cloud hosting services available to make your life comfortable and easy.

Cloud hosting services

Cloud hosting can be simply called an on-demand technology that works on the principle of shared storage and processing. The physical grid principles have been taken to the virtual world to ensure multiple computing resources share the hardware, and function with speed.

When you are hosting on the cloud, you are not hosting the data onto a single server but on multiple servers, thus safeguarding your data from system failures and other issues. Automating data access is another virtue of cloud hosting.

There are a multitude of cloud hosting services and cloud hosting providers that you need to take a look at, understand, articulate and assess for your needs. Majorly divided into three, public, private and hybrid, we will take you through each of them individually.

Public cloud: Available on the Internet, this cloud infrastructure is open to the public. It is easy to setup, highly economical, and comes with affordable bandwidth costs. You can opt for the pay-per-use model, which will allow you to pay for the services you use. The only fallback of this model is the fact that it follows the principle ‘one size fits all’, which may not be the case for your organisation.

Private cloud: Unlike the public cloud, the private cloud is owned by a specific company, and it offers the cloud computing benefits along with complete control over your data. Large enterprises opt for private cloud as they view it as enhanced security for their data and enterprise. The assets are singularly stored within the firewall strictly compiled by the enterprise.

Hybrid cloud: As the name suggests, it is a hybrid between the private and public cloud. It offers data control akin to private cloud, while keeping with the software-as-a-service principle of the public cloud. It takes the best of both the worlds, to offer extensive control and better data management to enterprises.

Benefits of cloud to organisations

With every technology that has come into existence, extensive opportunities have been created for businesses, and business models have evolved for better revenues and profitability.

• Reduced investments: When you are opting for the cloud, you are opting to pay for whatever service you would be using. Most often, enterprises need to invest in infrastructure that would be deployed on their premises. With the cloud, the cost and efforts involved in setting up the IT infrastructure are reduced, thus reducing the overhead costs in a major way. This, in turn, helps you fund your team and projects, thus increasing chances of profitability.

• Easy scalability: Upgrading a physical system requires a lot of effort from the team. You will have to develop and deploy the applications on the premise, and even deploy the hardware accordingly. That’s not the case with the cloud. The server and infrastructure are virtual which means scalability is definitely not your headache anymore. The development is easier on the cloud, making creating applications faster, and the performance testing easier for you.

• Easy maintenance: You are on the cloud, which means you don’t really need to invest time or effort in maintaining the infrastructure. Moreover, the systems and applications on the cloud undergo automated updates, which reduce your need to interfere and test or update the application or system on a regular basis. Downtime of the system can harm the company’s reputation, and even cause abandonments. With the right cloud hosting providers, you don’t need to worry about that, as now you won’t be facing any downtime.

• Transformed disaster recovery: Backup is a major trouble with people, and most people don’t attempt to take regular backup of their data, which could cause sudden loss of data. The process of backing up data manually is time-consuming and pretty expensive. To avoid the costs and time involved with backing up data, and to prevent the losses that are likely to occur with data loss due to unforeseen disasters, the cloud is the best path for enterprises. This will schedule auto-backup, and store your data to the server. The centralised database will possess all your data and is regularly synced, based on the intervals you have suggested. This makes life hassle-free for companies.

With the technology provided by cloud service providers, companies need not worry about their data and infrastructure and can concentrate on their core, bringing in more productivity and profitability to the organisation.