Moving to the cloud removes the chance that you have physical equipment that is woefully underutilized. Often when a company is purchasing physical equipment for their data center, they use an approach that results in purchasing more than they need with the hopes that they can grow into it. This often leads to many companies having too much equipment than needed to get the job done. When a company moves to the cloud, the solution can immediately scale up or down depending on the level of usage - meaning less money is wasted on physical equipment. When using a cloud solution, a business is not locked into features that they never end up using - they can instantly remove them from their instance to stop paying for them. There is a lot of flexibility provided to businesses when it comes to features available in the cloud.
- Brita Hammer, Digital Marketing Specialist @ Emergent Software
“To answer the question of how businesses can benefit from the cloud, one needs to understand the different reasons why a business might move to the cloud, for example,
- *Are they moving their applications and network infrastructure to the cloud? In other words, going all-in? *
- *Are they using the cloud just for backup? *
- *Are they using the cloud just for certain workloads, like big data processing or managing fleets of IoT devices? *
- *Are they just using the cloud to host an application or website? *
*Everyone knows that a business can reduce costs by being in the cloud. There is often a high initial cost outlay for the adoption, but then costs are dramatically reduced after that. They don’t have to take the cybersecurity risk of managing their own infrastructure in-house, they don’t have to take the risks in planning server capacity needs where failure to correctly estimate requirements can result in long delays while new equipment is ordered, or on the flip side of that, they might have too much capacity which is a waste of money. *
*In the cloud, you pay for what you use. In AWS, there is the shared responsibility model. Amazon is responsible for keeping hardware, facilities, etc. secure and maintained, while the user is responsible for securing their own networks and compute and storage resources they deploy there. Businesses using the cloud don’t have to pay people to manage hardware. They don’t have to pay for hardware for storage for a big data
“Data Lake” in the cloud-like S3 in AWS, and the service’s high durability means the risk of losing data due to a hardware failure is very low, so businesses that use the cloud for big data can be more secure in the confidence that their data won’t be lost due to a hardware malfunction. Companies that use the cloud for their applications can deploy globally, whereas companies that manage their own data centers can deploy to their data centers. They can still use CDNs like CloudFront, but these are cloud-based, so they are still dependent on the cloud for this fast global reach even if their origin servers are in a private data center. *
*There are certain things that just can’t be done without the cloud. For example, AWS has services for quantum computing or controlling satellites and collecting data from them. Businesses in the cloud can benefit from economies of scale that bring capabilities they would not have access to otherwise. *
*So after moving to the cloud, a few benefits a business will find are: *
1. *Reduced hardware costs*
2. *Reduced security risks (due to shared responsibility model) *
3. *Reduced labor costs (don’t need hardware expertise in-house) *
4. *Reduced data loss risk*
5. *Global reach for applications*
6. *Access to cloud provider managed services*
7. *Access to capabilities out of reach without the cloud*
- Nelson Ford, Founder @ PilotCore System