Efficiency. Agility. Doing more with less. – Whatever you call it, in today’s age of everyday disruption, fast-paced digital economy, and continuous innovation, it makes a solid business sense to move to the cloud. Cloud computing allows business owners to focus on what is important: their business.
According to IDC, the worldwide public cloud services spending could double and reach over $141 billion in 2019.
While defining their cloud strategy, businesses can choose between a public cloud, a private cloud or a hybrid cloud. The choice depends on several factors such as the type of business application, costs involved, technical expertise, and other business requirements. In this blog, we will have a deeper look at the public cloud and its benefits for businesses.
Let us first understand what a public cloud means. Public cloud is the most popular model of cloud computing. In this, the cloud service providers leverage the Internet and make resources such as infrastructure, storage, servers etc. available for businesses. Third party providers own and operate the shared physical hardware and offer that to companies based on their needs. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), IBM’s Blue Cloud, Google AppEngine, Sun Cloud, Microsoft Azure are some of the well-known public cloud providers.
With public cloud, the physical hardware is shared by multiple companies. The multi-tenant environment makes it easier to split the infrastructure costs across a number of users. Because of the cost advantages and pay-as-you-go model, the public cloud is ideal for small and medium sized businesses. Typically, non-sensitive, public-facing web applications which can get unpredictable traffic can leverage public cloud very well.
An extremely flexible pricing structure is one of the top benefits of the public cloud. Most of the public cloud providers give businesses the flexibility to pay by the hour. It helps businesses, especially the small and medium size, to tightly control their costs by paying for the infrastructure only based on their needs. Businesses can run their web applications without committing to a fixed cost for servers, software, setup or maintenance.
Businesses can set up their public cloud within a matter of few hours. It can be easily bought on the Internet and deployed and configured remotely through the cloud provider website. Your IT team can very easily configure and manage the set up remotely with just an internet connection.
In many cases, the staffing budget makes up for more than half of the total computing costs – simply because good IT engineers are difficult to find and are expensive. With public cloud, companies need to budget only for the cloud services and since the management of cloud is extremely easy, they can always restructure their IT Teams and use the skillful resources in the areas that make more money for the business.
The cloud provider is responsible for the maintenance of the hardware, software, and networks in the cloud. Businesses, therefore, do not need to worry about keeping their infrastructure up-to-date or worry about aspects like security and upgrades. It allows them to run the infrastructure with a minimal IT staff, thereby significantly reducing the overall costs.
Small and medium businesses typically do not want to get into long term contracts and commit to a certain storage or bandwidth capacity because, a lot of times, they are not really sure about the real requirements. In such situations, the public cloud hosting works out very well because it does not require a long-term commitment or investment. The cloud providers usually offer pay-as-you-grow models, which make the overall engagement extremely easy and hassle-free.
The public cloud offers massive economies of scale. It is extremely difficult to match it with private data centers. Businesses can be assured that the infrastructure is optimally used and the inevitable peaks and drops in the workloads are well taken care of. Since the infrastructure costs are shared across multiple users, the cloud providers typically optimize the hardware needs of its data centers and offer the services at lower costs.
Today, businesses need to be quicker and more dynamic to be productive. They need to continuously evolve and improve their processes, tools, technologies, and policies. Being agile enables businesses to take quicker decisions and appropriately prioritize the work and ensure customer satisfaction. With public cloud, businesses experience simplified internal operations, better delivery, better collaboration, faster rollouts of new business initiatives, and improved data gathering and analysis ability.
Be it the startups in India or online banks in New Zealand, several businesses which want to provide 24/7 access to their systems to their customers or employees are adopting the public cloud. Public cloud providers, with their massive networks of servers, network bandwidth, and the IT resources, are making the robust computing environment available and accessible for SMEs worldwide. In situations when a certain sensitive data needs to reside inside the boundaries of a particular nation, the public cloud makes it quick and easy to simply select the data center from that nation. The cloud providers have data centers across the world and businesses can select the one according to their business needs.
Before the era of cloud, businesses needed to buy additional hardware, storage, and software to prepare themselves for failure. This means that, in many cases, they had to duplicate their efforts and costs for ensuring the business continuity. With the cloud, the data is automatically mirrored on the data centers located at other locations – freeing up the businesses from worrying about data backup or excess costs.
Almost all the public cloud providers guarantee more than 99% uptime and no risk of failure. Since the overall cloud system interconnects several servers, in case of failure of any particular server, the other server takes over the workload automatically – ensuring a smooth and continuous performance for business-critical applications. visit Designrush
Cloud computing is no more just a buzzword. It is a proven and widely used option by SMBs worldwide. Typically, applications which are web-based, customer-facing, and require multiple users to connect from different locations, are most suitable for cloud deployment.