The future is cloud

It all started with being able to access your file from anywhere and for a while we thought that’s what the cloud was. It offered the convenience and flexibility that sent us into a euphoric mood knowing that our files were backed up somewhere. Another perk of this was it wouldn’t get full easily. Then entered Dropbox, this service was so game changing that it was popular at college once. I recall being hit with a computer virus that corrupted my entire presentation then the instructor said “next time, why don’t you use Dropbox?” I searched the internet and was so pleased with this service and the value it presented to me. Little did I know that it was a cloud based service too. The era we are living is cloud driven. Businesses are moving their workloads to the cloud as it offers more advantages than the traditional onsite data centers. With many players in the cloud industry offering a plethora of tools and functionality, it can get very confusing to understand what the cloud can do for you.  The benefits of the cloud include but are not limited to the following:

Scalability

As a business you may estimate that your online website serves approximately 10 000 unique visitors every month and use this as a benchmark for acquiring the underlying server infrastructure. While this may sound reasonable the problem arises the day visitors shoot from 10 000 to 30 000 and your infrastructure fails to accommodate the extra traffic. This will result in loss of potential customers and in turn a loss of revenue. The cloud addresses this problem by providing infrastructure that scales to meet the demand. At the click of a button or if you have rules set for auto scaling your infrastructure scales up(bigger server) or scales out(more servers of the same type) to meet the excess traffic and ensure that your online shop is available  24/7.

Fault-tolerance

Still on the online shop example, let’s say your online shop is powered by servers in your data center that you self-host. Everything is running and performing well on your end and then your internet service provider’s fiber cable coming to your premises gets cut along the way or damaged by say, road construction workers. How then will visitors access your online store? The cloud addresses this issue in a really cunning manner by introducing “regions” or “availability zones” which are more like datacenters which have independent infrastructure. Your online shop can be designed with the help of a load balancer to route traffic to two different regions or availability zones depending on which Is the closest. If the load balancer senses that the other location is down, traffic can then be routed to the active location.

Accessible from anywhere

In these times, working from home is essential and being able to do your job from the comfort of your own home is a blessing. The nature of the cloud enables working from home or anywhere in the world to become a reality. From file sharing to collaboration to video conferencing, all is possible thanks to the cloud. The Sales manager of the online shop can access the backend and view in real-time how sales are performing. They can even generate reports on the fly.

Cost Savings

Investing in IT infrastructure that you won’t use to its fullest capacity 100% of the time is expensive. The cloud enables you to pay only for what you use with no significant upfront investments. Instead of the capital expenditure(capex) model, the cloud allows you adopt an operating expenditure model (opex).

A business that aims to be world class service provider should consider the cloud as it is the future.