Advantages of Cloud Computing

Cloud adoption and usage has exploded in the last couple of years, as companies small and large have rushed to the Cloud providers. Covid19 further accelerated cloud adoption as it allowed for enabling remote work scenarios. In this article I review some of the primary reasons why cloud is such a favorite for small, to mid to large enterprises.

Free trials

Most of the cloud providers offer a free trial account/subscription with a certain credit amount for a limited amount of time or free cloud services forever.?It is typically a good idea to try the cloud services out before you sign up for a production subscription. Any power user in your unit or organization or someone from the IT unit can help you sign up for a cloud subscription. Microsoft Azure free account, for example, offers free access to its most popular services for 12 months, along with $200 credit to explore Azure for 30 days, or always have access to 25+ cloud services forever.

Cost savings

Cloud services costs are considered an operating expenditure (OpEx) instead of the traditional Capital Expenditure (CapEx) costs of procuring similar kinds of services within your own on-premises data center or another private cloud. Thus, the advantage of cloud services is that you don't have to put up the capital upfront to provision the cloud services in the cloud provider's data centers. This scenario is useful for your organization if you experiment and innovate with different proof of concept ideas and require infrastructure, virtual machines, application platforms, databases, and other similar services only for a limited amount of time. You can provision the needed resources for a limited amount of time - setup, configure, and utilize them and then de-provision them after that. With this scenario, you do not pay any CapEx or upfront costs but only the costs for the actual time you were utilizing the provisioned cloud resources. Most of the cloud providers also offer tools and utilities to help you manage costs for all your cloud resources and services you are consuming.

According to Sarbjeet Johal, a Cloud Leader:

Digital Transformation begs faster experimentation which is also economically viable, and cloud brings both agility and economics (CapEx to OpEx) factors together. Only due to cloud, a six people company was sold for $1 billion!

Security

Security has and will stay as one of the top concerns for cloud adoption and utilization. When considering migrating to the cloud, organizations should understand the fundamental differences between their on-premises data center and application/data security vs. how the security looks like when you end up choosing one of the cloud providers. Moving into the cloud means that you are now dependent on the cloud provider for making sure that their data centers are secure and have proper identity and access management systems, physical security, personnel security, infrastructure and devices/server security, and privacy measures in place.

You, as an organization, still own the responsibility of making sure that for your cloud resources, data security is intact as you start utilizing the cloud services. The onus of protecting your data, applications, and other cloud resources is not only on the cloud provider but also on you, thus making it a shared responsibility between you and the provider. As organizations adopt the cloud, the data and application security scenarios may be simple. But as we move into the future and large enterprises start implementing complex hybrid scenarios for splitting up their data and applications between their on-premises data centers or private cloud and the public cloud, the data and application security scenarios are also going to get involved.

It is critical that the current best practices and policies, which you may already have in place for your on-premises data and applications security are tweaked and made suitable to be applied to your data, applications, and other cloud resources that reside in the public cloud or are part of the hybrid setup. Cloud providers also offer security tools to help you properly configure your cloud services along with analyzing your services and making recommendations on any possible security issues it may see with your cloud services.

Each cloud provider also has a plethora of documentation that you can also access to properly configure your cloud services following the best security practices made by the cloud provider.

According to Ratan Jyoti, CISO - Ujjivan Small Finance Bank:

“The burden of possessing, managing, and maintaining the IT infrastructure has been the key challenge for financial sector. Banking with the cloud has definitely been a game changer. Many banks have already placed their less critical application to cloud computing as a low-risk exercise. The major benefits to the bank are:

No upfront capital costs and reduced, technology costs,

Faster implementation,

High flexibility and scalability, and

Multi-channel reach.

Support for open-source solutions and services

Open-source software and solutions are and can be key enablers of your digital transformation initiatives along with helping you innovate and experiment with your proof-of-concept ideas. You can utilize open-source solutions to minimize infrastructure and development costs along with helping you reduce time to market leading to you gaining a competitive advantage.

Key considerations when utilizing open-source software and solutions are to keep security front and center since some of the code may need to be modified to adhere to your organization's security framework. Almost all cloud providers provide support for enabling and deploying open-source solutions and resources. A prime example of open-source existence in the cloud is the Linux virtual machines that can be provisioned and deployed in the public cloud.

Cloud marketplaces for third-party solutions and services

Every cloud provider offers a marketplace, with solutions and services from themselves and third-party vendors, to offer to their customers. Microsoft Azure calls their marketplace Azure Marketplace. It has around 17,000 Microsoft-certified solutions and services available to anyone using Azure. All open-source cloud solutions are available via these cloud marketplaces.

GUI and CLI tools

Graphical User Interface (GUI) portals and Command Line Interface (CLI) tools are available for cloud administrators, architects, or developers to help them provision, deploy, configure, manage, maintain, and troubleshoot their cloud services. GUI portals are available for cloud users with minimal IT skills and know-how to use and navigate in a web browser whereas CLI tools are available for experienced IT users, who may already be using the CLI tools in their on-premises data centers and private cloud. As an example, Azure provides the Microsoft Azure portal as the GUI portal whereas CLI tools such as Azure CLI, PowerShell, and Linux Bash shell are provided for experienced IT professionals. Along with these tools, there are other key tools around security, cost, and cloud services optimization also available from all the top cloud providers.

Along with GUI and CLI tools to deploy, manage, and maintain cloud services, developer Integrated Development Environment (IDE) tools such as Visual Studio and open-source Visual Studio Code is also fully supported with Microsoft Azure. Visual Studio Code is an open-source version of Visual Studio and is freely available for Windows, Linux, and Mac machines.

Manual and automated provisioning

Once you have signed up for your cloud subscription, you are pretty much ready to start provisioning the required cloud services. Typically, you use the GUI portal from the cloud provider to sign up for one of the key cloud services such as a virtual machine, an application platform service, or a cloud database server. All these tasks can be managed via the GUI portals and typically take from half a minute to a couple of minutes at the most. For any complex deployments requiring deep customization and provisioning of bulk cloud resources at the same time, such as setting up 100 virtual machines , you typically will use either PowerShell or a CLI tool. Most top cloud providers also have APIs available for you to connect to and provision and deploy cloud resources.

Scaling Your resources

One of the defining characteristics of cloud computing is that it allows for elasticity and scaling of resources on-demand. Most of the cloud services resources can be scaled up or out depending on your needs.

?Virtual machines, as an example, can be scaled up, so they have enhanced hardware and more compute power. Typically, this can be done even after you may have started with a virtual machine with lower compute power and later decided that you need to enhance it to improve the performance of the virtual machine. As a simple example, if you are running a web server and hosting a website on a virtual machine and it is slow, you can scale up the machine, which in turn adds more compute power to it by giving it additional processors, RAM, storage, and IOPS (Input and Output per second when working with storage devices).????????

Virtual machines can also be scaled out to handle more load or network traffic. Imagine you are a seasonal business and typically have more customers coming to your e-commerce website during the holiday season in November, December, and January. Typically, you would use virtual machines for frontend web servers to manage traffic to your site. By using the cloud services and automated configuration, you can set up triggers to bring in additional frontend web servers running on virtual machines to handle the additional traffic during those months. The virtual machines can be scaled down once the traffic load goes down.??

?According to Ian Moyse, Chief Revenue Officer - OneUp Sales:?

“We live in a time where technology is affordable to all and the barrier is not size, costs or scale. cloud computing has flattened the options of choice. Legacy systems often required a large investment in infrastructure and installation making them prohibitive to the average firm. We had enterprise solutions and small business products from different vendors with different functions and benefits. Today innovation is rife, and a cloud solution can be for a global firm with 50,000 seats or used by a 5-user business, each paying a relevant monthly fee for their scale of usage. cloud has enabled AI., Big Data, IoT, Blockchain and more to be digestible to the small business. Anyone can utilize new technology to accelerate growth and breadth of customer reach.”

Maintenance & patching your resources

One of the key advantages of using cloud services is that you don't have to worry about patching your applications, virtual machines, physical servers, and other devices to the latest software. You will always have the latest and greatest software on your cloud resources. Since the cloud providers own the physical hardware and the infrastructure, they will be on point to do the required patching and security fixes on the entire infrastructure. You can, however, opt-out of some software patching for your resources just in case the patching and updates do not affect your resources and applications.???

Backup and disaster recovery

Cloud providers also have options available to back up your resources and data. Typically, this is an additional cost to the cost of the resource itself. Common backup options include backing up the resource in the same data center, another data center in the same region, or to another data center in a different region. All core cloud services, such as applications, virtual machines, and databases have the options to be backed up. From a disaster recovery and high availability perspective, you have the option to replicate your data in real-time. Any disaster in one data center or region will fail over your services to another data center in the same or a different region.

Technical support, troubleshooting tools, and utilities

When an organization signs up for cloud services and starts moving its systems and workloads to the cloud, the internal IT support model will also evolve. Most of the technical support work that used to be done by the support personnel such as accessing the infrastructure, servers, and applications in the on-premises data centers will now be performed by the cloud provider’s support and operational staff in their data centers. Since your provisioned servers, virtual machines and applications are now on the cloud provider’s infrastructure it becomes their responsibility to manage and maintain those resources. Some cloud providers offer free technical support for certain services while others charge for their technical support through various technical support offerings. There is always free support that you can get from the provider's social media handles or from their community forums.

?You as a cloud consumer will also have access to various tools, logs, and utilities to help you troubleshoot and maintain your resources on your own.?There are various backend access tools and utilities provided by the cloud providers to help you troubleshoot and fix issues for your cloud resources. For common issues, there are also built-in self-serve utilities within the GUI portals to help self resolve them on the fly. As an example, resetting the password for a virtual machine was a common question coming to Microsoft and now they have implemented the password reset feature right in the Azure portal for administrators to do it themselves.

Availability of key emerging technologies

All major cloud providers are offering key emerging technologies including Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and Blockchain et al. to help organizations move forward on their digital transformation journey. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and Google have “commoditized” these technologies and have made them possible to be in reach for organizations of all sizes via their cloud service offerings.

Cloud computing is fueling the fire on utilization of these key emerging technologies. The beauty of the cloud is that you can consume and utilize technologies like ML, AI, IoT, and big data at a reduced cost, pay-as-you-use model, accelerated network speed, and unlimited scaling as your needs grow. Because of these advantages, organizations small and large, are adopting the public cloud. Large organizations that have been using the public cloud for a while now are moving into the advanced stage of public cloud utilization with hybrid cloud scenarios. Hybrid cloud is helping organizations connect the on-premises data centers and private cloud to the public cloud. We are going to see a huge growth of hybrid cloud as more and more larger organizations start testing the public cloud by connecting their private cloud and on-premises data centers to the public cloud. _________________________________________________________________________

Liked my article? Then, check out my?paperback and e-book on Amazon to understand Digital Transformation and how emerging technologies are being utilized to enable many enterprise digital transformation journeys.?Are you interested in Digital Transformation, Cloud, AI, ML, IoT, Blockchain, other emerging technologies, Education, Training, Leadership, and other related topics? Then, let's also connect on?LinkedIn?and/or?Twitter.