Cloud computing as a market has, and continues to experience massive growth. Over the past 5 years, we’ve witnessed an increase of 20% in the projected revenue of cloud computing.
With more and more enterprises moving to the cloud, this has pushed cloud computing into the mainstream for businesses and personal life.
From our phone usage to our emails, virtually everything is now managed and stored on cloud computing.
However, the use of cloud computing is fairly expansive, not limited to just email storage, rather these systems, which are highly scalable, have become the first choice for testing, development and deployment of software.
The various examples of cloud computing uses range quite extensively, from video streaming to messaging apps.
Below you will find 5 examples of cloud computing, giving you an insight into why it has become so popular.
1. Scalable Usage
With cloud computing, you receive scalable resources through a variety of subscription models. This means, end users only need to pay for the resources that they use.
This makes things more cost effective, as spikes in demand is more easily managed, in situations where end users would ordinarily have to invest in more computer hardware.
Netflix is one of the most notable services that leverages off the cloud to its own benefit. Due to its highly popular streaming services, it constantly experiences large surges in server load, during specific times in the day.
The decision to migrate from their own in-house data centres to the cloud, allowed them to expand their services significantly, without having to spend obscene amounts of money on setup and maintenance.
2. Private Cloud and Hybrid Cloud
Among all the incentives that exist for using the cloud, two different situations are what most organisations look at, when looking at new ways to assess the applications that they intend on releasing into their environments; especially for the public cloud service.
While, when it comes to development and testing, there may be time limitations, when adopting the hybrid cloud method, this allows for more testing application workloads.
This leads to more comfort in the environment without having to spend money on the initial investment that would otherwise have been rendered useless in the event that the workload testing failed.
Another usage of the hybrid cloud is its ability to expand during high usage periods, which is the more preferable option to hosting large amounts of infrastructure that you’d otherwise rarely ever use.
The ideal situation for an organisation, is to have the ability to expand their capacity, only when required, allowing them to pay only for what they’ve used, and nothing more.
3. Backup and Recovery
When the end user opts for the cloud, for data storage, the data stored on the cloud is the responsibility of not only the data owner, but for the service provider also.
This saves the end user on a lot of money that would otherwise go into building infrastructure and carrying out maintenance.
The cloud provider is task with securing all stored data, meeting all legal compliance requirements.
With the cloud, you’re also give a lot more flexibility, in the sense that, it supports both large storage and backups on demand.
Data recovery is also carry out very quickly in the cloud. This is because the data is store over a network of many physical servers, rather than on your typically on-site data centre.
The best example of cloud backup services are Google Drive, Amazon S3 and Dropbox.
4. Business Process
You will find that there are a number of business management applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) that are cloud service based.
For the deployment of enterprise level software, Software as a Services (SaaS) has become one of the most popular methods.
The most popular examples of this service model are Hubspot, Salesforce, Marketo, etc. This method is both efficient and cost-effective, for both the customer and the service provider.
As it ensures hassle free maintenance, management, and security for any business critical resources, allowing the end user to access these applications in the most convenient way, through their web browser.
5. Test and Development
One of the very best examples of cloud usage, has to be in a test and development setting. This entails setting up the environment, securing the budget, time, physical assets and the manpower.
The next part of the process, involves the installation and configuration of the platform. This entire process, will oftentimes extend the amount of time that it would take for a project to be complet, which in turn will extend its milestones.
However, when it comes to cloud computing, there are many environments, readily available that are tailor to your needs, right at your fingertips.
These environments combine a number of elements, but are not limite to, the automated provisioning of virtualised and physical resources.
–AUTHOR INFO–
Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website https://www.compuchenna.co.uk
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.