Cloud computing is the most noticeable and valuable technological innovation in the 21st century. The reason behind this success is its fastest adoption into the mainstream than any other technology in the world. The ever-increasing number of smartphones and mobile devices that access the internet were the core reason for cloud success.
Cloud computing has applications that run in organizations and businesses as well as for average people. Few of its applications are running software programs without installing them on our personal computers, we can store and access our multimedia contents via the internet, we can develop and test programs without owning a server and much more. Cloud computing has applications in almost every field of 21st-century technology that you can think of.
Most of us might have questions in our minds like, why do we need cloud computing? Actually, cloud computing is a solution to such individual and business problems that we encounter today. Problems like owning and maintaining expensive hardware and software resources for our daily operations to adjust them in the most efficient manner for our benefit and the benefit of the community. For dealing with such challenges, cloud computing offers numerous benefits that have not only surpassed our expectations but delivered more than we had ever thought.
Importance of Cloud Computing for Businesses
Cloud computing resources offer extraordinary benefits to the businesses. These benefits are classified into two categories that involve:
Efficiency
By using cloud computing in business operations, efficiency is achieved in the following ways:
- Accessibility: You can access your applications and data from any location worldwide by using any internet-connected device.
- Cost-effectiveness: Cost for acquiring and maintaining resources is saved by paying for only those resources that are being utilized by you. It proves cheaper than acquiring the resources on your own.
- Security: Cloud providers offer private cloud services that implement the best security standards and procedures in terms to protect the client’s data in the cloud.
- Disaster recovery: Cloud architecture provides the most efficient mechanism for every type of enterprises and individuals to back-up and restore their data and applications in a faster and reliable way.
Flexibility
Cloud computing has achieved flexibility including:
- Scalability: If you are owning businesses with fluctuating workloads, then Cloud computing is the best option for you because cloud infrastructure scales depending on the demands of the businesses.
- Selection of Tools: Cloud computing allows its clients to select specific tools and features to derive solutions regarding their specific needs.
- Cloud Service options: Cloud computing offers private cloud, public cloud and hybrid cloud solutions where each has unique features. Clients can choose the option according to what to meet their needs.
- Control choices: Options are offered by the cloud provider, so businesses could determine their level of control. These options include Iaas, PaaS, SaaS.
Future of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is not only a smart choice for innovative businesses but it is a need now. Almost everyone admits that cloud computing is an unstoppable trend in the IT industry. However, it’s true that each IT organization differs in its journey to the cloud. While many of them are well-advanced in their cloud adoption, and others are still identifying the benefits they can achieve with cloud adoption.
I am often queried as reasons that an IT organization should consider when moving to the cloud. I must share five reasons for the companies that are just moving to the cloud.
The Boost in Speed and Agility
Today, a changing business environment is its truth itself, and it is evolving at an ever-accelerating pace. For example, in 2007, Blackberry was ruling the smartphone roost, and Apple’s biggest seller was its iPod. But at the beginning of 2014, Blackberry was nearly finished, and Apple had over $150 billion per year sales.
In the race of technological revolution, every business has to respond more quickly to evolving business conditions. Sadly, traditional IT processes are facing failure in the match for today’s speed. Cloud resources are available in minutes where traditional technologies take weeks or months in the same process. Hence by adopting cloud architecture, companies can rapidly respond to the new market developments.
A Continuous Innovation
Success in today’s business does not demand only speed, though. Today’s environment is critical about innovation as well, the ability to develop new offerings, evaluate their potential market adoption and then roll out the successful ones.
Again, if we make a comparison, then cloud computing is much better than the traditional IT infrastructure. As resources are available much quicker, so experimenting with a new offering is quicker as well. Companies can get user feedback instantly, instead of waiting for months to get something into a market trial.
As the scalability of cloud computing is easier that makes it grow the offering and address more users.
Helps in Managing Costs
Another fact regarding traditional IT infrastructure is how expensive it is. Definitely, infrastructure requires physical resources like servers, storage, and network, along with the expense of operating those resources (headcount, facilities, and power).
When we talk about infrastructure, most IT organizations aren’t very efficient. There is an infrequent procurement is done and in small amounts, therefore resource costs are high. Non- automated operational processes can cause a high labor cost.
Most IT organizations can make themselves capable of having a significant saving by using cloud architecture, whereas, not everyone agrees with this perspective. As I observed, most IT organizations can’t meet the cost structure of the big cloud providers.
Application Resiliency
Today, availability is more important than ever before. It is due to the increasing amount of companies that are becoming digital enterprises, where their customers and suppliers interact and engage by IT-based mechanisms like mobile applications.
Now for the time being applications are needed to be available, even an infrastructure failure is being faced.
Most on-premise applications are less reliable and cannot afford redundancy in order to contain single points of failure (SPOF) due to expensive equipment. In case of infrastructure failure, the application goes down and never stand back until a restore is done.
Cloud computing has changed the resiliency of critical applications. Now, it is very easy to obtain additional infrastructure resources. And in case of break down, it is very simple to restart the application on other resources.
Cloud is The Future of Your Workforce
A group of employees have figured out that cloud computing is the future and nobody wants to limit their career prospects by their skills stuck in obsolete technology.
So failing in cloud architecture adoption will cause your staff moving to a company that has already adopted the cloud for their career growth. So, in order to have a motivated IT organization, it is necessary for you to look forward to such plans that involve cloud adoption. Actually, it means building skills in both current and future employees, which requires education as well as training.
Conclusion
Cloud computing offers numerous benefits and solutions for problems that we encounter today. All business applications and the data can be accessed from anywhere, it offers a cost-effective solution where you no need to manage everything on your own along with the best security standards to protect your data.
Here you have five reasons that ensure cloud architecture represents the future. Demands on IT organizations are growing day by day, so it’s time to prepare, don’t hesitate, and move towards the cloud. Delays can’t be afforded any longer now.
Author: Nisar Ahmad
Systems Engineer, vExpert 2017-19, owner of My Virtual Journey, with experience in managing a Datacenter environment using VMware and Microsoft Technologies. This blog mainly covers virtualization and cloud technologies but also covers some other technologies such as Cyber Security, Quantum Computing etc.
