Cloud Trends that have been Responsible for Growth Across Business Sectors

Cloud is a perfect solution and some of the factors that have been responsible for growth across business sectors

Modern-day technology continues to evolve to provide more and more robust infrastructure to businesses at affordable prices. Cloud is one such platform that has proven to be a one-stop-shop solution for all needs. With a wide range of options to choose from, the ability to switch between platforms and technologies gives an undue advantage to trying a specific option. With uncertain times like pandemics gripping the world, it certainly is challenging for businesses to have a forecast. With remote working taking the world by storm, having to provide individuals with their machines to be able to connect remotely and perform daily operations, resiliency and security have become key concerns. Cloud presents itself as a perfect solution and some of the factors that have been responsible for growth across business sectors are:

1. Pay as you go

2. Ease of access

3. Resiliency of the cloud

4. Variety of Options under one umbrella

5. No specific platform dependency

6. Optimal usage of infrastructure used (use of ISPs in SDWAN)

7. Flexibility to Upgrade or downgrade

8. Scalability

1) Pay as you go: This is a great feature where an organization doesn't need to invest a certain amount of money buying specific hardware. As and when there is a need, they can request additional storage space/ servers and would only need to pay for what they are using. Post peak periods if organizations don't need additional resources they can go back to the original specifications.

2) Ease of Access:  Cloud allows ease of access from the Architect, Engineer and Technician perspective. One can access all their customers from one place and work on the service request as needed. Cisco Meraki is a great example of this where all your clients are under your org. All you need is to go to the specific client and make the required changes. You don't have to visit specific customer sites every time to make any small changes once the hardware is installed. Post installation of the hardware for 1^st time it is accessible from anywhere across the globe. The need to travel and the time taken saved is a win-win situation.

3) Resiliency of the cloud:  One of the most prominent reasons for the cloud to grow so rapidly is because of the resiliency it provides owing to its robust infrastructure. AZURE front door (AFD) is a modern cloud content delivery network that provides low latency and faster application performance by integrating the Microsoft edge networks at the service provider's station. Express Route is another feature that allows a direct private connection from client premises to Microsoft data center at speeds faster than a normal internet connection. This is more secure, fast, and reliable.

4) Variety of Options to choose from:  In legacy environments, a business had to procure different equipment like routers, switches, Linux DBA servers and firewalls, etc.; from various vendors to fulfill their requirements and these things come at a price. The faster processing speed one wants or for more features needed, one had to go for the higher end /latest model. Again, resulting in the cost going up. In case you needed to upgrade or downgrade, it would be difficult to do that regularly in a legacy-based environment. Cloud is a one-stop shop for everything. Everything gets taken care of, be it LAN, WAN, security, storage, or Dba. The pause and change options are the key here. When any specific service is not needed by any business for a certain time, they can pause it and resume it in their busy period without paying anything extra. This is very cost-effective and organization friendly as the dynamics of the business keep changing.

5) No specific platform dependency: With Cloud, there is no more specific platform dependency. Amazon's Lambda is a serverless compute service. During a scheduled software patch upgrade if a crash is encountered and multiple stakeholders are to be notified, AWS Lambda can be configured to automatically raise tickets as a result of the failure event with no manual intervention.

6) Optimal usage of Infrastructure: In a legacy environment, when we have two ISP circuits, the second ISP circuit is just a backup and doesn't come into play until there is a failure of the primary ISP circuit. Whereas in Software-defined wide area network (SDWAN) the performance of both the circuits is checked every few milliseconds and the one with better performance is preferred – making use of both the circuits concurrently, leading to optimal usage of infrastructure and resources.

7) Flexibility:  Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) provides a great range of processor options like AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, and request mac while creating an instance. Mac instances are useful when doing targeted development for specific apps that belong to the Apple App store. Amazon machine images are pre-loaded with Operating systems of well-known original equipment manufacturers like Windows and Linux to provide a wider range of options to choose from.

8) Scalability: Amazon RDS is a relational database service that provides you with an option to run your database service choosing to form 7 popular database service engines. Postgres is the most preferred database engine when you have finite data to query. The query results are processed at a lightning speed. As your business needs grow, you can increase the storage capacity without any wait time or downtime by using the push button option scaling feature.

Author:

Mohtasham Mohammed – Senior Team Leader, Network Solutions, CDK Global India

Mohtasham Mohammed, Senior Team Leader, CDK Global India, is a Client Delivery leader who started his career as a Network Engineer in the UK. He has overall around 11 years of experience in IT with 4 years of leadership experience leading Network Implementation & Design teams. He has helped in establishing Network Solutions, CX support, and Data services teams at  CDK Global India.