If we want to offer online services or products, we need hardware pieces, software, and databases. And guys - managing all of it in-house and also dealing with the main aspect of our business will get anyone to face an impossible task - efficiently scaling operations.
So pioneers in internet services, like Amazon with its AWS (Amazon Web Service), tackled these issues early on, creating what is now known as the revolution of Cloud Computing. Nowadays, businesses worldwide can access computing power almost instantly, even if they don’t have the hardware or the software required on-site.
This leads to cheaper energy bills, increased security, and the ability for businesses to access, manage and change data by outsourcing every aspect related to their online connection. Not to mention that by offering cloud services, there is a huge reduction in waste of equipment and engineers’ work.
As a business working with a cloud service provider, we need to pay only for the service fees. We are not required to spend a lot of money upgrading equipment, setting it up, servicing it, and then scaling it up or down, depending on how the business progresses at a certain point in time.
Because of Cloud computing, businesses are benefiting from massive increases in productivity and return on investment.
You heard that right! Companies can nowadays scale their operations depending on how their business cycles and resources required fluctuate. Just thinking about the whole process of setting up infrastructure ourselves and dealing with the IT administration in-house yells, “unproductive”. By scaling with the cloud, businesses get to determine the right plan for their needs and either upgrade to cloud services power or add another server in the picture.
We can divide this into 2 separate cases - vertical and horizontal scaling. With that being said, scaling vertically means, simply put, that when a business decides it needs more (or less) RAM, processing power, or storage capacity, it can simply upgrade its current cloud solution by asking for more power. Consequently, by scaling horizontally, businesses can add another server to their cloud computing plan and highly increase computing power.
Even more so, more than 90% of businesses that chose cloud computing have reported higher levels of efficiency.
By utilizing cloud solutions, we can concentrate on what’s most important: the goals and objectives of our business. Covid19 created a huge demand for cloud computing solutions when businesses realized how important it is in supporting remote work, processing big data, and lowering operating costs.
So cloud computing has improved communication and teamwork efforts when dealing with remote work. Even if employees are not physically present, remote teams can now collaborate on projects, share files, and work together fairly easily. Physical meetings and travel are no longer necessary, which may save a ton of time and money.
Not to mention that employees need only a personal device to access everything on the cloud. By getting rid of office equipment and location fees, companies are saving a lot of money. There is no surprise that the demand for cloud computing solutions is growing.
But if that was not enough, cloud computing offers an increased level of security for businesses.
That’s true! Global cloud computing service providers, like Amazon or Microsoft, can offer much more advanced security protocols for their servers than a business without any prior experience can. Data breaches and cyber-attacks are less likely to occur due to a few factors that make cloud computing even more useful.
Let’s take Microsoft’s Azure, for example. Some of the biggest corporations, banks, and even governments worldwide have implemented their service and are benefiting from a foundation of cybersecurity that could only be attained through huge financial and time investments. Microsoft deploys more than 3500 dedicated professionals only intending to combat digital crimes.
Even more so, by having multiple data centers across the globe, there is no single place where an attack can be infringed. When we think that every data center is protected by many layers of security algorithms and only a few people have access to the physical infrastructure, we start to realize that the levels of security that we can access by working with cloud solutions are far from easy to attain by regular business actors.
So, in the end, we need to emphasize the fact that cloud solutions have forever changed the way business is done online.
We all, from small to medium and even big companies, can benefit from a wide range of functionalities. From outsourcing computing power to remote working and accessing data and even increased levels of security, companies are gaining a lot of flexibility, return on investment, and improved productivity. And in a time where cyberattacks, data breaches, and phishing threats leave consumer and business data unprotected, it does look like cloud computing is here to stay.