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Before building your cloud computing strategy, you should know certain things they are what exactly is cloud computing, what are the various models of cloud computing, what is the benefit of cloud computing, and what business problems you are trying to solve with cloud computing. Let us try and understand these factors before building a cloud strategy.
What is cloud computing?
What is cloud computing? Cloud computing is an on-demand delivery of services like servers, storage, compute power, and other IT resources over the internet. It provides a simple way to access servers, software, services, and storage over the network, without provisioning any physical hardware or any nitty-gritty of managing that comes along. It gives you the power to scale or shrink any time without provisioning any physical hardware. The typical pricing model for cloud computing is ‘pay as you go’, where you will be charged only for the resources you consume and for the period you consume. So you need to pay any upfront cost.
The term cloud computing has created a buzz in the market. Almost every well-known mobile or web app is using some other kind of cloud service. There are many niche players in the market that are providing cloud services; out of them, the major ones are AWS (Amazon), Azure (Windows), and Google etc.
Benefits of cloud computing?
Here are benefits of cloud computing –
1. Saving the Cost
Moving your workload to cloud computing can reduce the cost of managing and maintaining your IT systems. Energy consumption goes down, IT wages can be curtailed, and once your usage is over,r you can throw the resources without having to purchase them in the first place, effectively paying only for the usage.
2. Flexibility and Scalability
Having your workload hosted on the cloud, you can scale up or scale down your operations and storage needs quickly to suit business situations, allowing flexibility.
3. Backup and Recovery
Though you may keep local backups, it is advisable to keep data backups at multiple locations, in case you lose the data from one place, your business would not suffer. Leveraging the benefit of cloud, you can keep your data backups on the cloud, as you have almost unlimited storage on the cloud at a very low cost. Even multiple copies of data can be managed on the cloud, enabling you to recover the lost copy of the data, which is one of the best business benefits of cloud computing.
4. Security
Cloud vendors provide many security measures to protect resources, and they keep multiple checks. They also provide you with the facility to tighten the security on the workloads they are going to host on the cloud.
5. Always On
Cloud computing is an ongoing mechanism in which you are all the time connected as long as the Internet is available. Also, the application can be accessed practically from anywhere. Now you might have got all the what are benefits of cloud computing by reading above mentioned points.
What problem are you trying to solve through cloud computing?
How does cloud computing work? Before making a move to building a cloud computing strategy, you should start preparing a list of problems you are looking to solve through cloud computing. This could be additional storage, or a pilot light environment, scaling, backup ,or DR. Having the key reasons with you will help you in selecting the appropriate cloud solution. The best way to list the problems is to do brainstorming within your team to see if there could be any alternate solutions as well.
Key Questions for Cloud Computing Strategies
Do we really need cloud?
Cloud computing strategy – A big question you should ask yourself before building a cloud strategy is- Do we really need cloud? Jot down all the challenges and available options. The cloud has its own pros and cons; go through them all. Once you and your team are convinced that cloud is the only option, you are good to move to the next step.
What services or functions should we move to the cloud?
Once you make up your mind to go for cloud, it is time again for an exercise. Jot down all the services or functions that need cloud movement. Is the complete infrastructure to be moved, or can we move only the problematic functions? What will be the downtime if we move the complete infrastructure? Can we start with a few services, and gradually move the remaining services to have lesser downtime? Answer all these questions.
Are we cloud-ready?
Once you have decided you want to move to the cloud, your applications should be cloud-ready. If not, it is time to re-engineer your applications so that they can be ready for cloud deployment.
Which Cloud to go with and what will be the operating costs?
The next big cloud computing question and deciding factor for choosing a cloud computing provider is the operating cost. As there are many cloud vendors in the market, deciding which one to go with is a tough ask. The key questions to answer when you are choosing a cloud vendor should be –
1. Geography:
let’s say I need to serve Indian customers through my app. Does the vendor have any data centers in India?
2. Services:
Does the cloud vendor have a majority of the services or integrations that we are using in applications?
3. Operating Costs:
The cost varies, based on locations. For the services we are planning to use, bandwidth consumption etc., the prices differ from location to location.
4. Support:
Last but not least, what is the SLA (Service Level Agreement) of services provided by cloud vendors? What level of support do they provide, and their turnaround time?
What about security?
Putting your workloads onto to cloud often lets you wonder, if you had total control of the infrastructure, how secure your data will be on the cloud, how often can the data be backed up. Well, almost every big cloud provider keep his infrastructure secured, and even provides features or tools to the customers which secure their data externally as well. Although the security, is on a shared responsibility model, wherein both the parties i.e. the cloud provider and the customer are equally responsible.
Hope, by this time, reading this article you must have got a good understanding of what factors to look while creating your cloud computing strategy. Be it deciding what to put on a cloud, the cloud vendor, calculating operating costs, backup strategies, downtimes, or cloud services. Choosing things wisely will definitely lead you success in cloud journey.
In today’s era, cloud computing is playing a vital role in giving new dimensions to your online business, and you can keep pace with the fast changes happening in the market. Being on the cloud, you can have all the freedom to scale up or down any time with sparing more and more time to focus on marketing your applications. If you are looking for a reliable, quality cloud vendor, you could Contact Us.
Also, read – 9 Ways Cloud Computing Can Benefit Your Business
