People think that cloud computing is just an application used to store videos, audio, and pictures online. But cloud computing is far away from a large digital technology that is taking the world by storm. It is a part of the business that stores and access data. Cloud is very important and beneficial for large businesses. Companies can work with major cloud providers and get service perks. Also, medium and small size businesses can get the advantages of cloud computing. It is a term that has gained widespread use over the last few years.
Cloud computing is becoming important as it offers data recovery, flexibility, low maintenance, high-level security, and easy access. So every organization wants to implement cloud solutions for their business growth. An IT-leading company, Dell says that companies that invest in cloud, big data, security, and mobility can achieve around 53% faster revenue growth than their competitors in the market. It shows that the cloud is making a firm place in companies for a better business experience.
Therefore, the demand for skilled and certified cloud solution experts is increasing rapidly. There are several cloud certifications available to help you begin your journey to become a cloud expert. In fact, people are seeking courses like introduction to cloud security to learn the basics of cloud computing and implement their knowledge in real-time cloud issues. So, this article is about the uses of cloud computing and the purpose to implement it.
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing is known as the on-demand delivery of IT resources through the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. With cloud computing, there is no requirement of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers or servers. It offers you databases, storage, networking, software analysis, servers, intelligence over the internet, and computing power, on an as-needed basis through providers like AWS (Amazon Web Services). It helps lower your operating costs, scale your business requirements, and run your infrastructure more efficiently.
Cloud computing is beneficial for almost every business as it is a big shift from the traditional way businesses think about IT resources. Therefore organizations are moving to cloud services. It offers cost-saving services that eliminate the capital expense of buying software and hardware and setting up and running on-site data centers, electricity for power and cooling, rack of servers, the IT experts for managing the infrastructure, etc.
Digital asset management, cloud computing services are available to all users on a global scale. Its biggest services run on a worldwide network of secure data centers that are continually updated to the latest generation of efficient and fast computing hardware. It offers several benefits over a single corporate data center that includes reduced network latency for applications and greater economies of scale. It can also avoid the need for many tasks such as hardware setup, software patching, and other time-consuming IT management chores. Therefore IT teams can spend more time on achieving other important business goals.
Why is Cloud Computing Used?
We know that cloud computing is the most effective way to achieve business goals. It is mainly used to get greater flexibility, cost reduction, elasticity, and optimal resource utilization. Cloud computing also helps to enhance the ability to achieve business goals. Let us have a look at how cloud computing is used in different forms.
- IaaS and PaaS- IaaS stands for Infrastructure-as-a-service that delivers basic network, computer, and storage resources to consumers on-demand, over-the-internet, and on a pay-as-you-go basis that can help save the cost of investing to acquire, maintain, and manage and IT infrastructure.
PaaS stands for Platform-as-a-service that provides customers a whole platform of software, hardware, and infrastructure for designing, developing, running, and managing applications that too without the complexity, cost, and inflexibility of creating and maintaining that platform on-premises. It helps increase the speed of development on a ready-to-use platform to deploy applications.
- Test and Development- We can use cloud services in test and development environments. It can secure a budget, set up your environment via significant manpower, physical assets, and time. It also can configure and install your platform. There are now easily and readily available environments tailored for your requirements. Sometimes it also combines automated provisioning of physical and virtualized resources.
- Hybrid Cloud and Multi Cloud- Hybrid cloud is also known as a computing environment that connects a company’s on-premises private cloud services and third-party public cloud into a single, flexible infrastructure for running the company’s workloads and applications. It provides an organization the luxury of selecting the optimal cloud for each application/workload and moving workloads freely between the two clouds as circumstances change.
Multi Cloud is a step ahead of a hybrid cloud that allows you to use two or more clouds from different cloud providers. It can be any combination of Saas, Paas, Or Iaas. It helps organizations decide which workload is best suited to which cloud-based on your unique requirements. It also enables you to avoid vendor lock-in.
- Big Data Analytics- One of the most important and the most common use of the cloud is Big data Analytics as it offers plenty of solutions. It is used to store, process, and analyze your structured and unstructured data, with various tools for data warehousing, data lake, and also ETL ( extract, transform, and load). Several cloud services for machine learning, artificial intelligence can help you identify patterns in your data and generate business values from a massive amount of data.
- Cloud Storage– This service offers you to store data and files in the cloud, enables you to use them everywhere you want to whomever you want. In this pandemic time also, cloud storage services are helpful as contractors and employees work from home during health-related shutdowns. It can also help synchronize files from your on-premises environment, ensuring you always have a backup in case of an equipment malfunction, fire, or natural disaster.
- Disaster Recovery- It is also considered as one of the important benefits of cloud services as it offers the cost-effectiveness of a disaster recovery solution that provides for faster recovery from a mesh of different physical locations at a much lower cost than the traditional DR site with fixed assets, higher costs, and rigid procedures.
Besides these, cloud computing is used for Data Backup so you can add additional backup services relatively easily. Restoring a backup might be as easy as picking which backup to restore and clicking a button. So the cloud is a great service for many things. You can grow and run your professional and individual operations smoothly with the cloud.
