Have you ever wondered what cloud computing is? How can it be beneficial to your organization? Don’t worry, you are probably among the 95% of people that are already using cloud services, like emailing, social networking, online banking without your acknowledgment.
The intended audience for this article are the entrepreneurs and organizations who are planning to migrate to cloud computing and are willing to acquire knowledge about why and when they should make this move.
Cloud computing is all about the delivery of on-demand computing services like servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics and more over the Internet (“the cloud”) on a pay-for-use basis. It is an economical, agile, scalable and elastic solution to your business IT needs.
Choosing the right cloud service
Today, many Cloud Service Providers out there, often called as CSPs, provide a wide spectrum of Cloud Computing services which can be divided into the following variants:
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
It provides virtualized computing resources over the Internet.
For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Compute Engine, IBM SmartCloud
Enterprise and Windows Azure.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
It is a cloud computing model that delivers development platform over the Internet. For example, Heroku, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Salesforce, Google App Engine and Red Hat OpenShift.
Software as a Service (SaaS)
It is a software distribution model in which a third-party provider hosts applications and makes them available to customers over the Internet
Examples of SaaS are Google Apps, Salesforce, Office 365, Banking apps and many more.
Why cloud computing?
Moving your business to cloud is a very daunting decision. One faces many questions that needs to be resolved before they plan the big move. We will be discussing below some benefits that can help a business decide and plan their migration to cloud.
•Flexibility
It gives you the agility to scale up and down your business’s setup demands. There are a number of options available in the market which allow you to deploy resources as per your business requirement.
•Low Investment
Expenditures for servers, rack spaces, power usages, IT requirements including staff get reduced exponentially. In some cases, you may get rid of fee recurrence.
•Zero or Minimal Maintenance / Security Concerns.
Cloud services offer time to time security and software updates, so you get the latest technology.
•Zero or Minimal In House Setup
No additional space required to facilitate the hardware setup like servers, backups and power supplies.
•Easy and Real Time Resource Sharing
Your teams can easily share their work and data, because they utilize the same resource but work on their own copy.
•Work As You Move
Because the resource resides on a public domain, you can access your business even if you are out of town.
•Easy Data Recovery
Data residing on cloud is less susceptible to be lost because of replication.
When to transit to cloud?
After realizing the amazing features cloud has to offer, one may think, when they should move their business to cloud. The answer is ASAP. Just go through this checklist when you should make a transit to cloud computing.
•If your business has huge cost liabilities for software, hardware upgrade and maintenance. Many traditional businesses maintain in house data servers due to security reasons, but this requires space and cost liabilities. Shifting to an IaaS cloud service can help in cutting down these inevitable expenditures.
•When a business is dispersed and needs more control, in terms of resource utilization. Cloud makes your team more organized and follow standard principles which helps you gain more control hence more efficient resource utilization. SaaS or PaaS based services best fit in these situations.
•When your business spends huge costs on IT and you strive to abide by latest IT policies like security, user management and authorization, load balancing and data sharing, cloud is the way to go. Your business’ IT will get a guaranteed exponential boom and that too at unimaginably meager price.
•When a business never sleeps and its availability should be assured day in and out. Taking this heavy responsibility in your undertaking can be quite risky, instead shifting this obligation to IaaS results in assured (almost 100 %) hassle free business availability.
This also makes your business mobile, you can carry your business as you move.
•When you never want to lose your business data. Cloud services usually replicate your data on at least two different server locations, this ensures redundancy not only across data centers but also globally. Cloud methodology is more sustainable during disasters like bad weather, electrical faults and hardware failures.
If you are facing any three of the above situation, this is the right time to get convinced and migrate your business to Cloud. Adding up all the benefits, you can really take your business to new horizons.
Matellio can provide you with the best expertise and resources to help you find what cloud services might best fit your business needs. If you would like to speak with one of our experts about your specific business needs, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Come and Join us in the Cloud.
