Have your head in the Clouds – Amazon AWS

Gone are the days when clouds meant the Cirrus, Cumulus or Nimbus types. Talk about clouds nowadays, and you will mostly likely hear about AWS, Azure, GCM, Rackspace.

 Why is cloud computing crucial for your business?

To being with, cloud Computing means renting, instead of owning, any computing infrastructure or service that can be accessed remotely. It is like the electricity grid – hook upto it and rent some computing resources without ever bothering about software licenses, hardware purchases, upgrades and maintenance.

If you are not on the cloud, then you are likely to lose your competitive edge. There is no longer any question whether cloud computing is viable for IT needs – a multitude of organisations, large and small, are thronging to cloud solutions. A few years back, just embracing the cloud to a small extent was enough to give an organisation a significant IT competitive edge over its competitors. Now, with the cloud fast becoming the de-facto standard, big and small organisations need to critically evaluate (or in most instances define) a cloud strategy.

So why should you think of adopting to the cloud?

Well, some top 3 reasons that we can think of are as below –

1. Lower costs – Cloud computing uses virtualization to fully utilize the underlying hardware. Your organization’s workloads are shared with other organization’s computing needs resulting in lower costs. The additional savings resulting from server rack space, power usage and staffing are invaluable. Additionally, since cloud services are typically pay-as-you-go, there are minimal up-front capital expenditures resulting in minimal start-up costs and predictable ongoing operating expenses.
2. Dramatically Increase Speed & Agility – Do seasonal traffic spikes like holidays regularly bring your site to its knees? Using the cloud, you can instantly automate traffic spikes by provisioning servers on-demand. This brings down new infrastructure provisioning from weeks to a few moments, and gives you control to ramp availability up or down as required.
3. Security – Many businesses struggle with security. Most cloud vendors offer robust enterprise, and often military grade security standards and controls. Offerings like network security, data encryption, access control, monitoring and security standards compliance are typically bundled into their cloud offering.  Your cloud environment is typically at least as secure than your datacenter, and you get access to a world-class security infrastructure at a fraction of the cost.

Cloud computing levels the playing field for small and medium organizations, and allows them to compete with much large companies. Information Technology has revolutionized the world in the past decades. Cloud computing is currently transforming the way companies do business.