Have you seen the Cloud!!??

The best Christmas joke I heard from our Sofico UK Development Team this year was – Did you know that Father Christmas wanted to migrate to the Cloud – but couldn’t as he didn’t have the foggiest idea what it was!

Ok ………………………so DevOps arn't exactly known for widely understood humor.

But I did at least remember that joke when speaking to a customer this week about doing exactly that – migrating to the cloud.

As the Non Tech – Tech guy at Sofico Uk I needed to remind myself what this was all about and why this should be top of our customers list for any Tech innovation they were considering.

First, its actually quite simple – Cloud Computing is the delivery of computing services ( Software, Storage, Hardware ) over the internet.

There are 3 types of Cloud Computing you should know about Public, Private and Hybrid.

A Public Cloud is where all the supporting infrastructure is owned by the cloud provider and the largest of these have grown from well known global businesses that sell the spare capacity their own system has eg Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure & Google Cloud Platform being the 3 largest.

A Private Cloud is one used exclusively by a single customer – Sofico has one of these just for own customers use and this is maintained by us on a separate private network offering best the security, availability and flexibility.

A Hybrid Cloud is a combination of public and private clouds bought together by technology that allows data and applications to be shared between them. This could be really useful to give instant scale to a business otherwise working in a private cloud that needs to access ( perhaps temporarily ) infrastructure or storage quickly to handle largescale events such as short term campaigns or mass customer ‘in life’ needs such as we saw at the start of the Covid Pandemic.

Cloud computing allowed the delivery of services without you having to actually purchase anything outright, you typically just pay for the amount or time you use the service you want.

This way of accessing for example software that just exists in the cloud, is called ‘Software as a Service’ or what you may have heard called ‘SaaS’. Here the cloud provider supplies everything needed except for the software.

Examples of well known SaaS offerings are Dropbox, Salesforce or Adobe creative Cloud all examples of software commonly accessed via the cloud.

The ‘……..As a Service’ title is also used for all the other types of things you can get via the cloud.

For example ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ is where the cloud provider just provides you with the Hardware and you would be responsible for everything else including the operating system and software.

Another example you will no doubt have used is 'Platform as a Service' where a business provides the hardware and platform for developers to place their applications on which are then accessed by end users for example Facebook or Tik Tok. In this case the developers can just concentrate on developing and maintaining their App. Without having to worry about the infrastructure needed.

Unhelpfully the ‘ …..As a Service’ handle has been taken up by every sort of cloud based thing you can think of from Banking as a service to Hacking as a Service and ultimately 'Anything as a Service' ( XaaS )

Some of these do have some merit including Mobility as a Service ( MaaS ) that I have widely written about and allows smart transport apps. to be placed in the cloud for access by anyone, from anywhere at anytime.

With Cloud based services you generally just pay for the amount or time you use the service which is commonly wrapped into a subscription which is typically paid monthly. ?

The subscription covers both the licence to use the software and for its maintenance.

Depending on what service you use and typically the scale of investment needed to create them, the subscriptions can have short ( 1 month ) or long ( 36 month ) ?minimum terms.

In short using cloud based services offers largescale savings over having to own and maintain ‘onpremise’ hardware and the ability to scale and flex instantly by just calling for additional services as your business needs them.

Your route to market is also much faster as there is no procurement or training time needed for infrastructure etc.

Technology moves rapidly and being cloud based means you can access the latest infrastructure to give you the fastest and highest availability. This is especially important if you offer your customers the ability to ‘self service’ what they need at a time when they need it. The cloud provider takes care of your service being available and at the speed needed, leaving you just to concentrate on the content your customers need.

If you needed anymore reasons to look at the Cloud, think about disaster recovery. Your data would be passed to the cloud provider who is usually not based anywhere near your premises so you can simply retrieve what you need if something serious would ever befall your own premises. Cloud providers also generally offer an automated back up service leaving you to just tell them what needs covering at what time.

?Your users can access cloud based services from anywhere with an internet connection which also helps the collaborative process if your business is spread around the world in different time zones.

Preparing for Cloud migration is really important as migrating your data can present a real problem.

The best way to do this is to work with the provider who may have or can point you to tools that can collate your data into the best format needed. Also have a good understanding of your current data storage totals so you don’t end up paying for too much from the outset and a prediction of growth with sound logic which again will help you agree a planned increased in services needed.

So in summary, if you are thinking of migrating make a comparison of the costs of purchasing and maintaining your own onpremise infrastucture against the proposed new costs of moving to the cloud.

Check if your own internet connection will be sufficient to cater for the additional demand accessing the cloud.

Decide if your intended cloud provider has adequate security and data governance.

Lastly, put in place in house processes to maintain effective data management and monitoring to ensure you are just paying for what you need.

Personally I have now migrated my phone to the cloud but I have found that I have since mist calls.......................