With the rising trend to move the infrastructure into the cloud, more enterprises are looking forward to building or migrating their IT hub into the cloud space.
There are several obvious advantages of cloud computing that explain its wide-spread popularity:
1. Cost of infrastructure– Having to build an entire network for data storage, processing units, clustered-network of servers etc. will scale as the customers grow. In that case, with cloud you can have pay-as-you-go services. Cloud vendors will provide an option for SaaS (if you already know what software you need), PaaS (platform as a service so you can implement your software solution over it) or even Iaas (infrastructure-as-a-service which can be Virtual Machines, etc.)
2. Security overhead: If we choose a cloud vendor who has excellent security offerings, that will reduce the burden of security on your organization’s network, even though we believe you will still need to have a degree of control over security of your data.
3. Efficiency and Flexibility: As mentioned, if we can choose to scale the infrastructure up and down based on uage patterns, it not only reduces cost but it also improves the efficiency and gives a flexibility to control what cloud resources are needed, and regulates capital accordingly.
4. Good disaster recovery techniques: If the cloud provider was able to manage and ensure the robustness of the infrastructure as part of SLA, that also makes life much easier for the administration and overall reliability. This may prove to be one of the biggest benefits of cloud computing, considering that so many enterprises do not have a well planned-out disaster recovery technique yet.
5. Newer versions of software releases: All cloud providers will be able to provide the upgraded infrastructure and software upgrades at a much lower cost than any traditional infrastructure upgrades. This may be a huge benefit as well.
6. Reduce carbon foot-print: By cutting down on the in-house data centers and infrastructures, over a longer period of time the companies will end up saving so much more on their carbon foot-print. This must be one of the key considerations for any enterprise, regardless of the line of business.
However, with all the advantages listed above, we must also acknowledge that not all organizations can have a “big-bang” change to move everything from in-house to the cloud, due to security, potential risks of breaches etc. A fine strategy needs to be developed for migration to the cloud. With the options of having private and hybrid cloud networks, it facilitates the process and cloud adoption model.
