The Cloud — why and how? A beginner’s guide to cloud computing.

Every business either a small organization or a big multinational company wants to speed up their business process and at the same time also wants to reduce the expenditure. The flexibility of the cloud provides that.

There are several problems organizations face without a cloud, like:-

1. Conventional methods are very costly and not at all fast and robust.
2. Productivity is very low without a cloud.
3. Data storage and retrieval are not available all the time.
4. Backing up data requires another set of storage devices and is not very reliable.
5. Dependence on third-party service providers increases without the cloud.
6. Organizations have to spend a large sum of money on software and hardware.
7. Flexibility without cloud is very minimal.
8. Maintenance of applications, hardware, etc. is neither time-efficient nor cost-efficient.

So, what is Cloud and why is it beneficial for your business? Cloud is a vast network of remote servers which are either used to manage and store data, provide software as a service, run applications, deliver a different kind of content, etc.

Following are the three different ways of deploying cloud resources for businesses:-

1. Public Cloud — Public cloud shares resources and offer services to everyone over the internet. Anyone can access the data over the public cloud. It can be built on low-level infrastructure and can be scaled up as per requirement.
2. Private Cloud — Private Cloud offers services and resources over an on-premise network to restricted users. It uses application management and virtualization tools to maximize the benefit of resources.
3. Hybrid Cloud — As the name suggests, it shares for both public and private cloud depending on the type of service requested by the client. It connects cloud resources to on-premise resources.

Cloud has three different development models as explained below:-

1. IaaS — Infrastructure as a Service where the third party provides data storage, networking on-demand, dedicated, and virtual computer hardware to users over the internet providing a lot of flexibility.
2. SaaS- Software as a Service is used by third-party cloud service providers to host different kinds of applications and make them accessible to their clients and reducing all the hassle of maintaining the applications.
3. PaaS- Platform as a Service in which third-party service providers hosts tools and application development platforms on their own infrastructure and thus removing the need for organizations to maintain and manage the infrastructure.

Cloud provides enormous flexibility for your business. Not only it makes your infrastructure maintenance hassle-free and but also facilitates on-demand real-time services.

1. Access files using any web-enabled device — Cloud is accessible from any web-enabled device. All the services, data will be available to the client 24*7, any time, any place.
2. Cloud provides scalability- The automation of the cloud is so perfect that it provides an auto-scale of all the applications. Enterprises need not worry about the maintenance, updates of any of the applications if it is deployed with the cloud model. The cloud server has the ability to expand its storage and bandwidth according to the client demand or traffic.
3. Increases Productivity- The flexibility of the cloud enhances the productivity of any enterprise by reducing their dependencies on the third party for maintenance of their infrastructure. Also with all-time accessible storage, any organization can really speed up their process of storage and retrieval of data.
4. Increased Collaboration — In an organization, there are different departments and they need to collaborate. The conventional method wasn’t really fast in sharing documents, reports, etc. but with the cloud people from different departments in an organization can edit, share documents in a real-time environment and collaborate better.
5. Reduces costs of business processes — Cloud computing cuts the expenditure of business processes. It’s a subscription-based model where you can subscribe for any service, virtual hardware, software on-demand, storage, and a lot more. This really saves an organization from hefty expenditures on different services.
6. Provides storage on demand and backup option — There’s nothing better than storing and accessing data anytime and anywhere. Cloud provides the flexibility of storage on demand and a very fast backup option. It provides disaster recovery where any organization can recover any lost data easily. Ultimately, it removes the cost of conventional hardware like hard drives which also do not provide all-time accessibility.
7. Fast and Secure — Cloud is robust, fast, and secure. There are various strategies and policies to keep data secured. A variety of technologies are deployed to control the security features of the cloud. Data Encryption is one of the security measures deployed at the server end to secure data.
8. The elasticity of Cloud- Cloud servers are easy to use and allow you to increase or decrease their functioning, thus providing a lot of flexibility over the cloud.
9. Quality Control — Cloud provides excellent quality control of your resources. Version control, revision, and updates are very easy with cloud computing.
10. Competitive advantage — Cloud computing provides enterprises with the best technologies and tools available and thus giving enterprises a better strategic value.

There are several cloud service providers like AWS, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Salesforce, and Microsoft Azure, etc. Apart from these, there are thousand other options to choose from. While selecting a cloud service that is best suitable for an enterprise, the following mentioned things are important to keep in mind:-

1. Size of enterprise and its requirement of cloud services.
2. Compare the pricing of different cloud services subscription to find the most suitable plan which is cost-efficient.
3. Leverage each of the cloud deployment models over others and choose the best, one can also choose a combination of different deployment models.
4. Enquire about what kind of after-sale support is provided by different service providers.
5. Choose the cloud service which provides ease of integration and good architecture.

With correct cloud service enterprises can really achieve another milestone in productivity and collaboration. The ease and flexibility of the cloud will boost up the performance and enterprises can maximize their outputs.