In cloud computing, the capital investment related to the creation and maintenance of data centers is replaced by the consumption of computing resources in the form of a flexible and utilitarian service provided by a “provider” of cloud computing.
While in the past cloud computing was considered the province of aggressive visionary startups and business users, today it is mainstream in enterprise computing in all sectors, for organizations of all types and sizes.
Benefits of cloud computing
Cloud computing has had a profound impact on innovation and the business economy in general. It offers forward-looking organizations not only improved flexibility, reduced costs and a focus on key skills, but also a complete transformation in how they work – for example, by redefining internal workflows or customer interactions in the form of digital experiences ranging from the data center to mobile devices.
Specifically, the business benefits of cloud computing are:
- Resources can be purchased and consumed on a “pay-as-you-go” basis, then increased or decreased as needed for optimal use.
- Capital expenditures can be converted into operating expenses.
- Cloud customers can focus on rapid innovation without the expense and complexities of purchasing hardware and infrastructure management.
- The functionality, performance, reliability and security of the infrastructure should improve as customers can benefit from “vertically integrated” customized batteries at all levels.
Will cloud computing work with existing infrastructure?
Although some companies have “transferred” their entire infrastructure to the cloud as part of a complete digital transformation, most will choose to take a phased approach that involves a hybrid environment. For this reason, it is important for your cloud provider to support integration with on-premises systems through standard connectors and interfaces, in addition to open frameworks and APIs that make client applications portable to your network. other platforms.
What are good initial use cases for migrating to the cloud?
For organizations that take a phased approach to cloud migration, there are a few use cases that offer good opportunities for initial success:
- Disaster recovery: Data center redundancy maintenance can be expensive. Storing redundant data in the public cloud, coupled with the use of specialized tools for disaster recovery process management, can be more cost-effective.
- Development and Test Environments: Similarly, using a public cloud infrastructure instead of replicating on-premises resources for testing / development can render large investments unnecessary.
- Managed Services: Collaboration applications (for example, G Suite), data analysis (for example, Google Big Query), and even machine learning (for example, Google Cloud ML Engine) can now be consumed as services complementary to local systems before the creation of a wholesale infrastructure. Move to the cloud.
- Data archiving: The public cloud can provide large-scale, cost-effective data storage.
- Computation-intensive specialized workloads: When access to massive computing power is needed, but only on a transient / ad-hoc basis, the cloud is an effective option.
What’s next for cloud computing?
Initially, cloud computing was based on exploiting the IT infrastructure more flexibly and cost-effectively. The next wave of cloud computing, on the other hand, is to help customers completely forget the existence of this infrastructure (in other words, “server-less computing”), which frees them to allow for a complete transformation of the digital business.
