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What is The Cloud?
“The Cloud” is a term that refers to the technology that allows us to access someone else’s (or our own) network infrastructure and servers remotely for professional and personal uses.
There are several use cases for cloud services. For instance, “Cloud Storage” refers to the implementation of the cloud to store data that can be uploaded and accessed from anywhere by any authorized user.
A similar implementation uses the cloud for off-site server backups, creating restore points in case of software or hardware failure.
The cloud is widely used in the testing and development phase of applications, providing a clean private environment that can be scaled on-demand without involving physical assets.
It also represents the ideal solution for streaming multimedia, increasing audience reachability while reducing structural costs.
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud Computing is defined as the usage of cloud technology to execute computational operations. You are provided with hardware, software, processing power, and storage according to your needs.
For the regular user, this can represent massive usability, speed, and resource management improvement. Now, with just an Internet connection, they can access or execute a program remotely, without their devices bearing the footprint of heavy computational tasks, but still receive the results of the operation, processed by specialized and bleeding-edge Cloud Servers.
Everyday services, like social networks, webmail clients, content management services, video streaming platforms, and even communication exchanges such as Slack are part of the cloud computing environment. This fact alone can help us understand its adoption.
According to a report compiled by Flexera, the adoption of cloud computing has been massive, with enterprises being the major cloud adopters. Cloud-based solutions are increasing in usage over time, with 93 percent of enterprises having a multi cloud solution set up this last year.
Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report. Image Source
What are the Five Benefits of Cloud Computing?
The trend toward cloud adoption is expected to continue its upward movement. Not a big surprise, given all the benefits that cloud computing represents. Here are the top five benefits of cloud computing:
1. Security and Law Compliance
The integrity and security of private information is the top concern of any business looking to outsource data processing or storage. As such, it’s a topic highly relevant among cloud computing providers, not only for the customer’s sake but also to maintain the cloud infrastructure’s impregnability.
Cloud computing data centers are essentially huge cloud farms with hundreds of servers and network devices. Consequently, these cloud giants are always taking the necessary steps to secure their networks with isolation technology, redundancy, heavy encryption, and secured authentication protocols.
One of Google’s data centers. Image Source
With the increasing demand for these services and the huge amount of data processed every second, regulation is imperative. Because of the constant government scrutiny and the atrocious consequences that any legal incident may carry, the cloud industry’s dominant companies have a strong incentive to comply with all regulations.
2. Hassle-Free Setup and Flexibility
Setup, maintenance, and automatic updates are all addressed by the cloud service provider. Due to increasing demand and crave for efficiency, the requirement of continually improving their structure with the latest hardware and software developments has generated a competitive edge with respect to their rivals.
Hybrid clouds (private and public cloud setups) have benefited companies that needed private cloud services for more sensitive information but did not have the necessary resources to configure and maintain local centers. The cloud is an on-demand service, making it easy to meet the requirements of any business regarding storage, computational power, or even bandwidth at any point in time.
3. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Even with the most strict rules and protocols, some situations are simply out of our control. A power outage, natural disaster, a fire, and even acts of vandalism can harm our infrastructure. Downtime means revenue loss, and even worse, any type of data loss can negatively impact our business in terms of reputation, trust, and customer satisfaction. One of the reasons cloud computing has been continuously growing is because of safeguards against these scenarios. Cloud data is usually distributed and backed up across multiple physical locations to ensure business continuity during less than favorable conditions.
4. Mobility
Having the ability to get the job done without being tied to a specific physical location is a major asset in today’s industry. Cloud computing offers a way to run tasks from our home, which has been relevant during these pandemic times. Not only that, but since the computational power is not really needed from the client’s end, almost any mobile devices (including smartphones) are useful while on the go. The process of sharing progress, status, or material is immensely simplified with the cloud. This also enhances connectivity and collaboration among employees, keeping all the parties involved updated with all relevant information.
5. Cost Savings
Operational cost savings is likely the most sought-after primary benefit of cloud computing. There has been a considerable increase in cloud services spending, and many companies are spending more than planned in this regard; however, the inversion is justified.
What is the Business Impact of Cloud Computing?
By moving to the cloud, enterprises can expect the following economic benefits:
- Data security increases the brand’s reputation, hence increasing revenue growth without the company having to secure the infrastructure on its own.
- These companies will experience a significant reduction in hardware and software upgrades and specialized IT professional services in their budget, but also their power (and space) consumption will decrease considerably if they move to the cloud after having local data centers.
- As we know, the reduction of downtime to a minimum helps companies avoid financial losses.
- The disaster recovery protection being outsourced represents a relief in their spending plan and personnel needed.
- Working remotely can increase productivity and avoid interruptions in the workflow, allowing us to save time and money.
The Cloud Represents Enormous Value
In summary, if we look closely, we can attest to the prevailing tendency of cloud services taking over the Internet Industry, with multi cloud solutions as the main approach for enterprises. The cloud has been providing enormous value for organizations when remote work is almost a rule during the pandemic. Even with that out of the equation, cloud computing has had a considerable impact on productivity, efficiency, security, and revenue growth, mainly for small and medium businesses, which usually have less room in their budget to configure their own clouds.
Migrate to the Cloud with Liquid Web
Are you interested in setting up your own cloud structure? You can check out our public or private cloud offerings and see which is right for you. Need help? You can open a live chat with us or give us a call at 1-800-580-4985. Our technical support staff is always available to assist if you need additional information about cloud computing, 24/7/365.
Are Your On-Premise Servers Slowing You Down? Download the eBook to Find Out Why Outsourcing Managed Web Services is Better For Your Business.
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