How To Boost Your Business Through Cloud Computing

Previously, it used to be a difficult decision for many businesses to move their information technology (IT) infrastructure to the cloud. However, that decision is becoming easier with the recent innovations and surge in cloud computing. Essentially, moving a business’s IT infrastructure to the cloud has numerous advantages than disadvantages. To most businesses it is the cost saving advantages that are most beneficial. Businesses that make the shift to cloud computing could experience numerous cost benefits that in the long run could increase their revenue.

First off, cloud computing offers storage and collaboration benefits. Storage is the main purpose of using cloud computing; however, there are businesses that take it a step further by using it for collaboration purposes. Either way, these two functions could save a business plenty of costs. Cloud takes over the storage needs of a business and ensures a company gets quality storage at only a fraction of the cost that it would require a business to do it by itself (Catteddu, 2010). For example, for a business to have its own in house data storage they would need servers, several hardware and software, as well as highly trained IT professionals.

 Furthermore, cloud computing results in low power cost. An in house IT infrastructure requires plenty of hardware that consumes power. On the other hand, cloud requires less hardware and consumes less power. Also, it is cheaper to shift to cloud computing as it requires no upfront investments, as many of the IT infrastructures are handled by cloud service providers at a fix cost (Catteddu, 2010). Another cost benefit of using cloud is reduced workforce. When using cloud a business no longer require to recruit expensive IT experts for their computing needs. In this respect, costs like salaries and other employment benefits can be avoided. Additionally, cloud computing minimizes redundancy. When a business is running its own server it needs to buy extra hardware to act as back up that acts to the overall cost. Typically, cloud uses several data centers and replicates that data for effective resiliency (Catteddu, 2010). As such, a business save the cloud is an effective and inexpensive way of dealing with redundancy.

Software as a service (SaaS) refers to a software distribution format, where third-party providers hosts software or applications from developers and makes them available to consumers at a central point, such as the internet (Bento & Aggarwal, 2013). Saas is critical to an organization as it eliminates the need to install softwares and application on their own data bases that reduces eliminates the high cost of hardware acquisition and maintenance. Another benefit of SaaS model is that it eliminates the need and expense associated with for software installation and licensing.

Platform as a service (PaaS) is a cloud computing design that allows third party providers to provide software and hardware tools for application development to consumers over the internet, for example Java runtime (Bento & Aggarwal, 2013). PaaS providers host the hardware and software on its infrastructure, which eliminates the need for users to install their own hardware and software to develop new application.

The infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a part of the cloud computing that offers virtualized computing resources to users over the internet. Basically, a third party provides the virtual hardware or computing infrastructure that are usually present on in-house data centers. Examples include storage and networking hardware and servers.

References

Catteddu, D. (2010). Cloud Computing: benefits, risks and recommendations for information security. In Web application security (pp. 17-17). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Bento, A. M., & Aggarwal, A. (2013). Cloud computing service and deployment models: Layers and management. Hershey, PA: Business Science Reference