Saturday, November 12, 2016

Why is Everyone Raving About Cloud Computing?


Today, you can hear that almost every organization is in the race to either get into cloud selling business or take over a company that is already into cloud computing. Every small and big organization wants to move their applications to cloud and make it more readily available to its internal and external users. What may be the reason for such competition? What is so great about cloud that IT organizations are running behind it?

Just imagine those times before social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and more such, came into picture. It was so difficult for organizations to reach out to its customers and end users. But with the advent of social networking, it is so easy to reach out to the audience and sell products. Cloud computing has made this possible. That is why most organizations are more than eager to migrate their applications to cloud. The answer also lies in huge cost savings for organizations, which typically incur on setting up IT infrastructure and maintaining it. Are you wondering what is cloud computing? Read my blog on "Living on Clouds, an Office Away From Office!".

Cloud computing is an evolving trend of computing and is just getting bigger by the day. It provides immense benefits to IT organizations that wants to sell technologies and infrastructure as a product. Cloud computing has several interesting features to offer with one of its key benefits dwelling in its agility.
As per the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), following are the key characteristics of cloud computing:
  • On-demand self-service capabilities: An organization can procure cloud services through a third-party cloud service provider and customize the cloud by accessing it over internet. The organization can also increase the storage space and allowable number of users, and upgrade the storage network and software as per their requirements. The service provider will bill the organization on a pay-per-use or monthly subscription fee, with certain terms and conditions. 
  • Easy network access: As an end-user of the cloud, you can access cloud over internet from any part of the world by using different devices such as smartphones, computers, laptops, and tablets. Especially for business people who keep traveling extensively or those who need to provide support to customers 24/7, cloud makes it easy to stay connected with their work and stay on top of their business deals and customers.
  • Resource pooling: Cloud makes it possible for multiple people of an organization, located in different geographic locations, to use the same application hosted on the cloud, to gather or process data, simultaneously. The underlying network and hardware resources are pooled and assigned or reassigned to different users in a virtualised manner as per the demand. 
  • Rapid and elastic: Here, elasticity means the flexibility of scaling the cloud as per the ever changing business needs. You can easily modify the number of users, upgrade software and network capabilities or modify other resources. 
  • Measured service: The cloud provider monitors cloud resources consumption, the number of users, and the network bandwidth of an organization through measured services and typically, charges the organization only for what they use. The terms and agreements are set initially and bills the organization accordingly. 
You may also be interested in understanding the benefits and risks of using cloud. Read my blog on "Advantages and Disadvantages of Cloud Computing".

Imagine that you own a small start-up company that you launched recently, and now, you want to develop it and make it bigger. Do you think you should get your business on to the cloud? Leave your comments.

References

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