What is the cloud? what the Benefits of Cloud Computing

• Cloud computing is the delivery of different services through the Internet, including data storage, servers, databases, networking, and software.
• Cloud Services can be both public and private—public services are provided online for a fee while private services are hosted on a network to specific clients.
• Types of Cloud Services

Regardless of the kind of service, cloud computing services provide users with a series of functions including:

• Email
  • Storage, backup, and data retrieval
  • Creating and testing apps
  • Analyzing data
  • Audio and video streaming
  • Delivering software on demand

• Major Vendors: Three major vendors are AWS, GCP and Azure
• Cloud Computing Benefits:
  • High Speed- Quick Deployment: The ability to spin up new cloud computing instances in a matter of seconds reshaped the agility and speed of software development. Developers can easily test new ideas and design application architecture without the dependency on on-site hardware limitations or slow procurement processes.
  • Services in the pay-per-use mode: Cloud computing offers Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to the users for access services on the cloud and pays the charges as per the usage of service.
  • Unlimited storage capacity: Cloud offers us a huge amount of storing capacity for storing our important data such as documents, images, audio, video, etc. in one place.
  •  Low maintenance cost: Cloud computing reduces both hardware and software maintenance costs for organizations
  • Automatic Software Updates and Integration
  • Efficiency and Cost Reduction: By using cloud infrastructure, you don’t have to spend huge amounts of money on purchasing and maintaining equipment. This drastically reduces CAPEX costs and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). You don’t have to invest in hardware, facilities, utilities, or building out a large data center to grow your business. You do not even need large IT teams to handle your cloud data center operations, as you can enjoy the expertise of your cloud provider’s staff.
  • Data Security: Data security is one of the biggest advantages of cloud computing. Cloud offers many advanced features related to security and ensures that data is securely stored and handled.
  • Scalability: Different companies have different IT needs — a large enterprise of 1000+ employees won’t have the same IT requirements as a start-up. Using the cloud is a great solution because it enables enterprises to efficiently — and quickly — scale up/down their IT departments, according to business demands.

Cloud-based solutions are ideal for businesses with growing or fluctuating bandwidth demands. If your business demands increase, you can easily increase your cloud capacity without having to invest in physical infrastructure. This level of agility can give businesses using cloud computing a real advantage over competitors.

This scalability minimizes the risks associated with in-house operational issues and maintenance. You have high-performance resources at your disposal with professional solutions and zero up-front investment. Scalability is probably the greatest advantage of the cloud.

• Collaboration: Cloud applications improve collaboration by allowing groups of people to quickly and easily share information in the cloud via shared storage.
  • Unlimited Storage Capacity: Cloud offers us a huge amount of storing capacity for storing our important data such as documents, images, audio, video, etc. in one place.

• Back-up and Restore Data: Once the data is stored in the cloud, it is easier to get back-up and restore that data using the cloud.
  • Mobility: Cloud computing allows us to easily access all cloud data via mobile.
  • Disaster Recovery: Having previous versions of software stored in the cloud, and having production instances running on multiple cloud availability zones or regions allow for faster recovery from disasters: if your application is deployed on multiple locations and for some reason one region goes down – the traffic can automatically failover to the working regions without any interruptions to the end-users. In other cases where there is a major bug in the software release, a quick rollback can be initiated to restore a previously released, more stable version to minimize damage.

• Cloud Computing disadvantages

A list of the disadvantage of cloud computing is given below –

• Internet Connectivity: As you know, in cloud computing, every data (image, audio, video, etc.) is stored on the cloud, and we access these data through the cloud by using the internet connection. If you do not have good internet connectivity, you cannot access these data. However, we have no any other way to access data from the cloud.
  • Vendor lock-in: Vendor lock-in is the biggest disadvantage of cloud computing. Organizations may face problems when transferring their services from one vendor to another. As different vendors provide different platforms, that can cause difficulty moving from one cloud to another.
  • Limited Control: As we know, cloud infrastructure is completely owned, managed, and monitored by the service provider, so the cloud users have less control over the function and execution of services within a cloud infrastructure.
  • Security: Although cloud service providers implement the best security standards to store important information. But, before adopting cloud technology, you should be aware that you will be sending all your organization’s sensitive information to a third party, i.e., a cloud computing service provider. While sending the data on the cloud, there may be a chance that your organization’s information is hacked by Hackers.
  • Cloud downtime: Downtime should also be considered while working with cloud computing. That’s because your cloud provider may face power loss, low internet connectivity, service maintenance, etc.