Cloud Computing Advantages
Overview
Every organization is unique regarding its technology infrastructure and related software services requirements. Furthermore, every organization has its own journey to cloud migration with potentially many benefits. In other words, every organization’s journey to the cloud and the benefits it finds to some degree varies. That being said, in general, there are many advantages of cloud computing, and in this post, I’ll discuss the cloud computing advantages
These are the following:
- Increase in speed and agility
- Variable expenses
- Cost reduction.
- Measure capacity
- Focus on the core business
- Making applications available global fast
Table of Contents
Increase in Speed and Agility
So, Let’s start with an Increase in Speed and Agility. In a cloud computing environment, provisioning resources are just one or a few clicks away. Furthermore, the capacity of the machines can be scaled up and down to handle request fluctuations, which in some domains varies heavily.
Let’s take the example of CNN; if some major newsworthy event happens, the CNN website or apps will suddenly notice a heavy increase in traffic, resulting in degradation of service quality.
You can use cloud computing in this situation. You can scale up by launching more servers to meet the sudden increase in demand and then scale down when traffic comes to normal. Moreover, services can be temporarily shut down if not required or completely terminated if they are not needed to save cost.
Lots of options are there for saving operating technology infrastructure costs as well.
Let’s take another example to understand how cloud computing helps improve speed and agility.
Suppose if an organization needs resources as soon as possible to do some POC, which is a shorter form of Proof of Concepts, for some critical business requirements. They can tap into cloud computing platforms to get the resources quickly up and running. This helps organizations reduce the time, as the time it takes to make those resources available is reduced significantly — in many cases, from weeks to within a few minutes.
The above discussed few examples demonstrate how cloud computing leads to a significant increase in speed and agility for organizations.
Variable Expenses
Let’s discuss the variable expenses advantage. One of the advantages of cloud computing is a variable cost in cloud computing vs. upfront capital expenditure in the traditional style.
In cloud computing, you avoid buying servers upfront. Instead, you pay only for the services you used.
Let’s consider this with an example of an e-commerce company doing business for around the year 2000 time. The company would buy high-end servers to scale up to meet the significant increase in demand during Christmas. But, during the year when sales were not usually high, those expensive servers were not fully utilized and would remain idle for a while.
On the other hand, in the cloud computing platform, say AWS, using Auto Scaling Service, you would configure it in such way as new servers would be launched automatically when the load on the servers increase and terminated when the load on the servers decrease –you need a few configurations.
And the result is a huge saving in cost.
You see the point where depending on how big the e-commerce organization is for its technology infrastructure, this cost-benefit would be significant if that e-commerce organization is transitioned to a cloud computing platform.
Cost Reduction
Another advantage of cloud computing is that organizations can benefit hugely in cost from massive economies of scale.
Using cloud computing, you can achieve a lower variable cost than you would get on your own by buying individual servers or setting up VM, etc. – setting up your own Cloud Computing platform because thousands of customers are using the cloud, cloud providers, for example. AWS can provide cloud services at lower prices.
No More Guesstimate of Capacity
Let’s discuss another advantage, which is No More Guesstimate of Capacity. Usually, when you make the capacity decision for servers to deploy your applications, there is a higher likelihood that either you end up having expensive resources and sitting up idle most of the time. Or, you end up having resources that are very limited in capacity.
In other words, it’s challenging to do capacity estimations –which in some cases true, though. That being said, in cloud computing, no need to do a guesstimate for your infrastructure.
Now with the Cloud computing model, you can measure how much capacity you require, and then within a few minutes, you scale up or scale down as your requirements change.
Focus on Business
Another advantage is that organizations can focus on their Core Business when they use cloud computing platforms.
Cloud computing helps organizations focus on their core business instead of dealing with powering their servers, network connectivity, bandwidth issues, security, and so many other things they have to deal with if organizations have their technology infrastructure on-prem data center.
By transitioning to the cloud computing platform, organizations can change direction and stop spending money running and maintaining their data centers. This allows organizations to focus on their core competencies in doing their business.
Making Applications Available Global Fast
And the last we have here is the ability to make your applications available worldwide within a few minutes.
Organizations can now easily deploy their applications to multiple locations around the world with just a few clicks. This allows organizations to provide redundancy across the globe and reduce the application's latency.
Having redundant deployment across the globe helps increase application availability. Reducing network latency helps increase applications’ network performance.
The availability and reduced network latency translate not only in increasing your customers' footprint but also in your applications’ degree of usability. And the key point is that you get these at a minimal cost and time.
There is one important point to bring to attention, which is a level playing field. Going global was very expensive in terms of cost and process. Only the organizations having deep pockets could afford to do. But cloud computing makes the deployment of your applications globally – a level playing field. With cloud computing, any organization can deploy its applications globally at minimal cost and time.
Summary
In summary, Cloud computing has transformed technology infrastructure. It has impacted all organizations: either traditional IT organizations such as banks, insurance companies, or software engineering organizations in all sizes — large, medium, small, or startups.
And the reasons are obvious: cloud computing provides flexibility with so many choices that are a few clicks away.
With Cloud, computing resources are easy to find and set up because of the high degree of configuration.
You have excellent cost options: low variable cost and pay for what you use. Moreover, nowadays, providers are giving some excellent pricing options – you save big in cost and time for how you used to get IT infrastructure resources in traditional IT.
SK Singh is the founder, a software, cloud, and data engineer. He has been involved in the software industry for around 25 years. He has a bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering from India and a master's degree in software engineering from the Pennsylvania State University. SK has been involved in a wide range of software projects for many governments, private, start-ups, and large public companies in various software engineering roles. He has many professional certifications such as AWS, Hadoop, Kafka, Oracle, Unix, Java, Java-related frameworks, and many others related.
