‘The Cloud Advantage – Your guide to understanding the benefits of cloud computing.’
You have surely heard about cloud computing and its potential to revolutionize IT and business. But what exactly, will this ‘revolution’ do for you? And how can you take advantage of it? You will learn that and more here.
What is Cloud Computing?
First things first – what is cloud computing, and how does it work for businesses? Well, ‘cloud computing’ simply refers to the ability to access computing resources (applications, databases, email, disk storage, and so on) outside your own closed-off environment in your office.
A common analogy to describe cloud computing is leasing versus buying. In cloud computing, you lease or rent capacity, whether that is a disk, or a server, or even access to software, from a cloud service provider, and connect to it over the Internet. Instead of buying your own IT requirements, you lease them from a service provider, paying for only the resources you use. This last part – paying only for what you use – is one of the most attractive features of the cloud computing model, as we shall see shortly.
Cloud Computing Models & Providers
Cloud computing comes in different flavors or models to suit the differing needs of businesses. These are:
Private Cloud: This is essentially a cloud built and run either by your internal IT or by a 3rd party, exclusively for your company or organization’s use. It is essentially an extension of your office LAN (Local Area Network) over the Internet, allowing you to access at least some of your applications, email, files and other resources over the Internet. The huge advantages of a private cloud are control and data security, since your data and resources are accessible only by you and your employees. But as you may imagine, a private cloud is also expensive to set up and maintain, both in personnel and financial terms. For this reason, it is typically used only by large organizations and those for whom data-security requirements trump the cost and complexity factors. A good example is biotech firms, which are sensitive to corporate espionage.
Public Cloud: A public cloud is one in which the computing resources are stored off-site by a 3rd-party company, typically on commercial terms, and accessed over the Internet. The storage is managed by an external company such as Amazon, Google or Microsoft (a bit more on these below). This service offers the greatest level of flexibility and cost saving; but it is more vulnerable than a private cloud.
Hybrid cloud: This is simply a mix of private and public cloud. Some companies have some parts of their business that are very sensitive and must be in a private cloud, but are ok with placing the rest of their resources in the public cloud. For example a commercial bank may insist on a private cloud for data related to its core banking platform that handles loans, mortgages, account withdrawals and deposits, but are fine with having their other less-sensitive data hosted on public cloud.
The public cloud is the most well-known nowadays, mostly because of the larger-than-life commercial providers in this space. Although a very young industry – the pioneer is Amazon via its Amazon Web Services (AWS) which only started in 2006 – the players have really upped their game in terms of breadth of resources and cost. In fact the impressive abilities of public-cloud providers means they are now truly viable alternatives to, and in some cases even better than, having all your servers and applications in the office LAN.
So who are these players? The biggest one is of course Amazon via its giant AWS platform. Other large players are Google’s Cloud Platform, Microsoft’s Azure IBM’s cloud. See the chart below for an indication of their relative market shares and sizes as at Q2 2017.
There are also several smaller players who differentiate themselves from the big boys by tailoring their offerings to specific niches, such as Rackspace and DigitalOcean who focus more on those who need resources for development of software applications.
Why move your IT infrastructure to the cloud?
So now you know about cloud computing, who the largest players are, and the different cloud models. And the Internet and news are awash daily with tales of cloud computing and the various happenings in that space. All that may or may not be relevant to your business. The question now is, why should YOU consider moving your resources to the cloud? Especially considering that as far as you know, your IT department is managing things just fine – your applications are generally accessible when needed, servers are …umm… serving up applications with only rare downtimes (and yes, that’s how ‘servers’ got that name), you can almost always access files on network folders when needed, and you are generally happy with your current setup. So why change?
The short answer is: because the cloud can save you money and personnel costs, and it can improve your IT operations. Let’s expand this answer by going through some of the advantages of the cloud computing model. Read through these and see if they apply to you. If at least one of them is applicable, then it may be time to seriously consider moving at least part of your IT operations to the cloud.
Reduce your costs (especially capex): remember that the cloud computing model, especially the public cloud, is all about leasing and paying only for what you use. There is no upfront capital-expenditure. Also keep in mind that a lot of IT infrastructure is obsolete within a few years of purchase, and as your business grows you need ever more powerful servers. Plus, the need for in-house computing resources has a knock-on effect – you also need an IT guy trained to maintain these servers; you need a secure datacenter (server room) to house your servers, and this in turn needs a sophisticated cooling system because servers get very warm; which means you need to pay a specialist company to support that cooling system, and so on. With cloud computing, the headaches and costs that come with hosting equipment are someone else’s problem.
Easily cope with infrastructure demand: all public cloud providers offer virtual servers. Unlike the baked-in limitations of your hardware servers in your datacenter, virtual servers can scale up and down as needed. Your organization suddenly needs a new disk to store all your emails? Easy, you simply log in to your cloud environment and request increased disk space. The IT department informs you that your application needs a more powerful server because you now have more users logging in? Easy, migrate your cloud-hosted application to a new virtual server a few in minutes. Such operations are impossible or at least complex and time-consuming on a physical server. For example to increase a server’s memory, you need to purchase the new memory module (or in a worst-case scenario buy a new server) and then shut the entire server for the upgrade; remember the last time you received an email from IT about ‘the server will be down this weekend for maintenance/ to increase capacity’? That can be a thing of the past with cloud computing.
Run your business, don’t worry about your IT: as we’ve mentioned before, hosting your own IT resources typically requires specialized and highly trained IT staff to manage them. You need a database administrator for your databases, a maintenance / support technician to look after your servers, and also pay specialist companies to look after your datacenter and other ancillary services. With cloud computing, most of these are unnecessary. You will still need some IT personnel, but a significant portion of their time can be re-dedicated to more productive activities rather than routine, mundane maintenance work. One other huge benefit of the cloud for your IT, is that they no longer have to worry about applying software updates and patches to your software such as Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Office, Oracle and so on. All this is handled automatically by the cloud provider.
Excellent disaster recovery and backups: a key part of the IT system or network administrator’s work is to ensure that the company’s data is protected, even in the event of catastrophic loss of the physical servers. This typically means organizing offsite backups. This can be very expensive and technically challenging to set up yourself. But with a cloud setup, this is automatically taken care of. Cloud providers have inbuilt redundancies via several physical locations around the globe, and they offer the ability to automatically back up your data in real time to at least one other location in addition to the one you are using.
Flexibility and better collaboration for employees: collaboration is made easy in the cloud. The ability to save and access various files through the cloud enables employees to easily work on the same documents and files even outside the office. Cloud collaboration tools such as Google Drive allow users to upload, edit and even comment on documents, which makes for better workplace collaboration. And advanced security features allow employers to limit what employees can access. As a bonus, being able to access files through the cloud makes it easy for small-business owners to track and manage individual progress on assignments. How’s that for efficiency? With cloud computing, if you’ve got an internet connection you can be at work. And with most serious cloud services offering even mobile apps, you’re not restricted by which device you’ve got to hand.
Reduce your carbon footprint: lastly, moving to the cloud is good for the environment. It is more efficient and environmentally friendly to transport 50 people in one bus than one person per car in 50 private cars- the same argument and metrics apply to the cloud. Consider 50 individual companies, each with a single server running at 40% capacity, and typically never used during night-time hours. This is inefficient and wasteful. But with clod computing, a physical server can host several virtual servers, each used at max capacity. And come night-time, someone else in another timezone can now use the same physical server.
Your Cloud Computing Partner
What we have outlined here are just broad advantages to be had when undertaking cloud computing. Some of these may be applicable to you and some may not. There are also some risks to consider when moving to the cloud. A good cloud partner should work closely with you to identify your unique business needs and help you mitigate the risks. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you take advantage of the cloud for YOUR business.