What is cloud adoption and how companies can benefit from making the switch

Cloud adoption is one of the most important aspects of digital transformation for organizations. It not only allows organizations to scale their IT infrastructure but also have maintenance flexibility and be focused on primary business operations. Also, this transition reduces the amount of time and money spent to maintain complex IT infrastructure and on-premises data centers.

All about cloud computing services

There are three main types of cloud computing services: Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-service (SaaS).

IaaS is a computing infrastructure that is managed over the internet. The main advantage of using IaaS is that it helps users to avoid the cost and complexity of purchasing and managing the physical servers.

PaaS cloud computing platform is created for the programmer to develop, test, run, and manage the applications.

SaaS is a cloud-based software delivery model in which the applications are hosted by a cloud service provider. Users can access these applications via the internet on a subscription basis.

Cloud computing types

In today’s world, there are mainly three types of cloud computing models: Public cloud, Private cloud and Hybrid cloud models.

Public cloud?is cloud computing model that’s delivered via the internet and shared across organizations.

Private cloud?is cloud computing environment that is dedicated solely to your organization.

Hybrid cloud?is any environment that uses both public and private clouds.

What are the benefits of cloud adoption

Security: Cloud providers protect infrastructure, applications, and data on the cloud through defined processes, accessibility controls, and strong governance policies. One of the main objectives of cloud computing security is to minimize the risks that companies face continuously and to ensure business continuity even in the face of an attack. Cloud providers hire certified experts to implement very robust mechanism for intrusions and implement firewalls to protect the data. Some of the benefits of having a well-defined security architecture include 24x7 visibility, high availability of systems, and effective protection from DDoS attacks.

Performance and scalability: Cloud enables organizations to quickly scale up or descale infrastructure resources to meet the changing demands. Data storage and processing power can be improved very quickly without any disruption or downtime through cloud adoption. A scalable cloud architecture can be made available through virtualization. Unlike physical servers, virtual servers are highly scalable, flexible, and can host multiple virtual machines (VMs) at the same time. Applications can be hosted on these servers and can be moved to larger VMs to meet performance and scalability needs.

Upfront capital cost: Cloud adoption minimizes the upfront capital expenditure incurred to purchase new hardware and for the management of IT infrastructure. Cloud adoption enables companies to set up infrastructure resources rapidly without waiting for physical hardware procurement. This reduces cost of hiring skilled manpower as infrastructure is maintained by the cloud companies.

Simultaneously, the need for hardware upgrades and huge software licenses that need to be installed on premise are also eliminated. Also, cloud enables scaling hardware based on future needs without incurring physical hardware setup expenditure at on-premise data centers.

Ease of maintenance: Maintenance of the hardware is the responsibility of the cloud provider. Cloud providers have experts monitoring the infrastructure, which helps provide uninterrupted services to the customers. All the software upgrades are overseen by cloud providers, who also make sure that all the resources are aligned/upgraded to their latest versions.

Business continuity: Cloud providers ensure continuous availability of hosted systems by taking care of outages and unexpected failures. In case of outages, disaster recovery (DR) mechanisms are put in place to help get the system up and running in no time. A massive benefit that ensures seamlessness, in turn, making sure that it’s business as usual for customers and companies availing cloud services.