What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud Computing has been the buzzword for quite a while now. So, let’s try to understand this concept.
In simple terms, Cloud Computing is the on-demand delivery and consumption of IT resources and services over the internet, with pricing based on usage.
To understand this concept, let’s first look into the traditional IT environment setup.
In the traditional environment, there are physical facilities called data centers with hardware like servers, storage, network equipment, racks, power supplies, cables, cooling equipment, and a team of personnel to maintain them.
Organizations purchase, own, and provide maintenance for the entire setup, thus investing in the hardware resources upfront and utilizing them as and when needed.
It can sometimes lead to resource over-provisioning, causing capacity waste and unnecessary expense, or the under-provisioning of resources, negatively affecting the business performance.
With the onset of the cloud, certain providers own and manage such data centers with hardware resources. Instead of purchasing, owning, and maintaining hardware in their own data centers, organizations can utilize the hardware resources from the providers and only pay for their use. Organizations can request resources whenever needed and release them after completion of the work, thus preventing capacity waste and improving cost control.
Now having understood the basic concept of cloud computing, let’s get to some of the advantages of Cloud Computing —
Agility
In the traditional environment, businesses wait for weeks or months for any infrastructure setup. The cloud helps provision resources in minutes, and organizations can implement new technologies and quickly go from ideas and designs to implementations. It gives them much flexibility and the capability to experiment without worrying about any upfront capacity planning.
Elasticity
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The ability to scale up or down the number of resources helps businesses grow or shrink their resource capacity according to their needs. It helps to avoid upfront capacity provisioning and improves cost control.
Cost
With the cloud, there is no need for any upfront investment in infrastructure, which means low capital expenses. It uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model, which means purchasing capacity when needed, releasing it after use, and paying only for the usage. The cost benefits vary on how systematic the organizations are about the allocation and usage of cloud resources.
Management
Organizations need highly skilled personnel to manage the infrastructure components in traditional data centers. With the cloud, this is taken care of by professionals from the cloud providers, thus reducing security risks, outages, and manual errors.
Massive Economies of Scale
When a large number of customers use cloud services, the cloud providers can procure resources at a huge scale at lower costs and provide them to the consumers at a much lower price per usage.
Conclusion
Cloud is especially good for new businesses and startups, as it discards the need for any data center setup and gives the required flexibility and cost consideration concerning the capital expenditure. The bigger organizations may choose between pure cloud (public or private) and hybrid cloud (public + private) as per their business or compliance requirements.
I will be covering the Cloud Deployment Models in an upcoming post.
Hope this article helped you with some basic Cloud Computing information!
Regards,
Ramya
P.S. Image credits to Rawpixel and Dreamstime.
