What Is Cloud Computing? Benefits, Types and Cloud Providers
Waking up at 3 AM only to find out that all your data got corrupted and is now lost forever. Well, that’s not a pretty sight to wake up to. With the world moving towards digital transformation, organizations are now in desperate need of robust solutions to protect their sensitive data. While there are many options available, cloud computing has taken over the market with a storm. According to a recent study, cloud computing generates more than 300 billion U.S. dollars in revenue in 2020 and is showing very few signs of slowing down.
Cloud Computing in Simple Terms
Cloud computing in the simplest terms means storing and accessing data and programs over the internet rather than your computer’s hardware. instead of acquiring, owning, and maintaining on-prem infrastructure. You can now gain access to various technology services such as storage, computing power, databases, and much more.
Who Is Using Cloud Computing
Cloud computing has become increasingly popular due to the added security they offer. Organizations of every size and type are using the cloud for a variety of services. Popular ones include disaster recovery, software deployment, and testing, data backup, and customer-facing web applications.
In 2019, Software as a Service (SaaS) represented the largest segment of the global cloud computing market, responsible for 125.5 billion U.S. dollars in revenues. Overall, the global cloud computing services market spendings amount to 253 billion U.S. dollars.
What Are the Three Types of Cloud Deployments?
1. Public Cloud
The public cloud is available to the general public, and the data is stored and created on third-party servers. By using the public cloud, multiple tenants share the same cloud provider’s infrastructure.
A plus point of using this model is that users do not have to maintain their own IT infrastructure. They can swiftly add more users or more computing power as needed with great ease.
Public cloud deployment models have proved to be the best choice for businesses with low privacy concerns as they are cost-effective and efficient.
Advantages Of A Public Cloud
- Hassle-free infrastructure management
- Reduce costs
- 24/7 uptime
- High scalability
2. Private Cloud
A private cloud, also known as an internal or corporate model, is only accessible to the company that owns a private cloud. The server can be hosted remotely or on the premises of the organization.
Regardless of their location, these infrastructures are upheld on a designated private network. They use hardware and software that are intended for use by the owner company only.
A private cloud minimizes data security issues as only a few people have access to the information which is stored in a private repository.
Private clouds are favorable for high profile business or companies which have constantly changing requirements. According to a recent survey In 2019, roughly 58 percent of responding companies stated that they already used private cloud solutions.
Advantages Of A Private Cloud
- More control
- Security & privacy
- Improved performance
- Flexible development and high scalability
3. Hybrid Cloud
A hybrid cloud encompasses the features of both a private and public cloud. This has proved to be very convenient for companies as it is a cost-effective and reliable solution to their business needs.
With hybrid cloud organizations now have the option to store their critical data on a private cloud and less sensitive data on a public cloud. In addition to this, the hybrid cloud also facilitates data and application portability.
Advantages Of A Hybrid Cloud
- Cost-effective
- Increased flexibility and scalability
- Enhanced security and privacy
What Are the Benefits of Cloud Computing?
Cost-Efficient
Using cloud infrastructure eliminates the capital expense of buying and maintaining hardware software and maintaining on-site data centers. In short it reduces CAPEX and OPEX.
Mobility
By using a cloud infrastructure, users can access their files from anywhere in the world. Gone are the days when users had to carry around a US drive, multiple CDs, or external hard drives to access their data.
Users can now process, store, retrieve and recover data from the cloud. You can now view your updated documents too from any part of the world without any hassle or added effort.
Speed
Most cloud computing companies offer self-service and on-demand, so an even immense amount of data can be provisioned within a few minutes, commonly with only a few mouse clicks. This offers businesses a lot of flexibility in taking the heat off capacity planning.
Reliability
Cloud computing makes data backup, business continuity, and data recovery efficient and cost-effective. The data stored on the cloud can be viewed at multiple redundant sites on the cloud provider’s network.
Elasticity
With cloud computing, users do not need to overprovision their assets to handle their growing business in the future. Instead, they can equip the number of resources they need.
Users can scale up and scale down their resources according to their growing business requirements.
What Are the Three Deployment Types of Cloud Computing?
IaaS
Infrastructure as a service is one of the types of cloud computing service that offers all vital compute, storage, and networking resources on-demand, on a pay-as-you-go basis for staff members to stay up to date with co-workers and customers.
Users can easily process, store, retrieve and recover data from the cloud. Cloud vendors provide all the necessary updates and upgrades automatically, saving time and effort. IaaS lets companies avoid the complexity and cost of buying and managing physical servers and data center infrastructure. Each resource is offered as a separate service component, and you only pay for a particular resource as per your requirement.
PaaS
Platform as a service refers to cloud computing services that provide an on-demand environment for developing, testing and delivering, and managing software applications.
They allow users to bypass the expense and complexity of buying and managing software licenses, development tools, infrastructure middleware, and other resources. Users manage the application and services they develop, and the cloud service provider manages everything else.
SaaS
Software a service permits users to connect to and use cloud-based apps over the internet. SaaS offers a complete software solution that you buy on a pay-as-you-go basis from a cloud service provider.
Users can build or deploy apps for their business, and they can connect to it over the internet. All of the underlying infrastructure, app software, middleware, and app data are located in the service provider’s data center. The service providers maintain all the hardware and software.
Subject to SLA, SaaS allows organizations to get up and running in no time, that too with a minimal upfront cost. In 2021, the software as a service (SaaS) market is estimated to be worth approximately 123 billion U.S. dollars
Examples of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing has become an essential part of our lives without us even noticing it. Every day software such as Microsoft Office also uses the cloud for the storage of its data. Microsoft additionally offers a bunch of web-based applications, Office (also known as Office for the Web), that are web-only versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote accessed through your internet browser without installing anything. That makes them a version of cloud computing.
Some popular examples also include
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): Microsoft 365
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): Microsoft Virtual Machine
- Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Microsoft Azure
- File Sharing + Data Storage: Microsoft OneDrive
- Big Data Analysis: Azure Analytics Services
- Data Governance: Azure Purview
- Cybersecurity: Microsoft Defender
List of Cloud Service Providers?
While market competition in cloud services has increased drastically in a short period. In 2020, Salesforce was the largest Software as a Service (SaaS) vendor worldwide with a market share of 9.3 percent. Other key players in the market include Microsoft, SAP, and Google. We have rounded up some of the best cloud service providers leading in the market.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure offers a wide range of solutions to its customers. Not only do they provide a high level of security, backed up by a team of IT experts, but they also operate hybrid seamlessly. Their continuous innovation ensures that they can cope up with your ever-changing business requirements and help you to stay on top. According to a recent study, In the third quarter of 2021, Microsoft Azure revenue growth stood at 50 percent.
Digital Ocean
Digital ocean is one of the trending cloud service providers. Trusted by one of the biggest companies in the world, such as docker, WeWork, Splunk, and slack it has gained the trust of many people in a very short period.
They offer a wide range of services such as IaaS, PaaS, Cloud Native for all networking, compute, and database needs for your applications that too at very affordable prices for small scale and large scale organizations.
Alibaba Cloud
Ali Baba is one of the leading cloud service providers. They offer a wide range of services such as simple application service, Elastic Compute service, domains, object storage service, and much more. They help businesses to reach new heights with their outstanding practices.
Amazon Cloud
Amazon Web Services offers an expansive set of worldwide cloud-based products including storage, networking, developer tools, IoT security, enterprise applications, etc. These services help associations move quicker, lower IT expenses, and scale. They are trusted by a large number of organizations for a wide variety of services such as game development, storage, archive, etc.
Google Cloud
Google cloud is a cloud service that is introduced by google. They are trusted by the worlds leading organizations such as Unilever, Toyota, Shopify, Macy’s, etc to handle all their IT and cloud computing needs. In 2020, Google Cloud revenue amounted to 13 billion U.S. dollars, accounting for 7.2 percent of Google’s total revenues.
Key Takeaway
While cloud computing seems to have its fair share of benefits, it also has some drawbacks as well. The cost increases when your bandwidth increases, and there could be crashes as well, which may cost your company to lose access to its backup for a short period.
However, we can all agree that cloud computing has proven to be a lifesaver for organizations, and the proof can be seen through its increasing revenue.