Mar 2022
Both Businesses and Individuals are adopting Cloud technologies at a breakneck pace. Cloud Computing has been part of Information technology (IT) for more than 20 years, but with evolving technologies, it has become an absolute necessity now.
The cloud allows you to take advantage of a Cloud provider’s infrastructure and investments and makes it easier to maintain consistent access to your applications and data. You’ll also gain the benefit of turnkey solutions for backing up data and applications that can survive disasters and, other performance and availability problems.
Today, companies rely heavily on software solutions and access to the data. In fact, in many cases, a company’s most valuable assets are directly tied to data and applications. Because of that, investment in IT has grown tremendously over the past couple of decades. Reliance on premises IT departments worked well in the early days of IT , but access to the data and applications has become such a critical part in day-to-day operations that localized IT systems have become inefficient on multiple levels.
The core requirements to run any IT business efficiently and the benefits of cloud computing are:
-High availability
-Scalability
-Elasticity and agility.
-Fault tolerance and
-Disaster recovery
Some of the common challenges to run any IT business operations are
-Network outage
-Application performance
-System outage (such as a virtual machine outage).
-Power Outage
-A problem with a reliant system, such as an external database.
In a perfect world, you experience 100% availability, but if any of the above problems occur, with cloud services, the percentage will begin to decrease. Therefore, it’s critical that your infrastructure minimize the risk of problems that affect the availability of your application.
Cloud Providers offer a service-level agreement (SLA) that guarantees a certain level of availability as a percentage. An SLA will usually guarantee an uptime close to 100 percent, but it only covers systems that are controlled by the cloud provider. Cloud IT consulting invests a lot of money in network infrastructure, and by moving to the cloud, you gain the benefit of that infrastructure and additional reliability that comes with it. If something within that infrastructure fails, the cloud provider diagnoses and fixes it, often before you even realize the problem.
Virtual Machines (VMs) are software based computers that run on physical computers. A Single computer can run multiple VMs, and each VM has its own isolated operating system and applications. ALL VMs running on a computer share the CPU, memory and storage of the host computer. Cloud Provider maintains them and will constantly monitor the health of VMs and will have systems in place to recover unhealthy VM and help companies to run their business smoothly during system outage.
You might also host a web application in the cloud that is used by external customers. Depending on the usage pattern, you might want to add additional computing resources on certain days or certain times. You might also need to quickly adapt to more users if your company receives unexpected publicity from the media or some other means. In such scenarios, Scaling and Elasticity in cloud services in which you add more VMs for your application or move to a new VM with additional resources help you to run your applications efficiently.
In a complex cloud environment, cloud providers implement systems that monitor the health of cloud resources and take action when a resource is determined to be unhealthy, thereby ensuring that the cloud is Fault tolerant. Fault tolerance is designed in a way to move you from unhealthy VM to a healthy VM. Disaster recovery, which not only means having reliable backups of important data, but also means cloud infrastructure can replicate your application’s resources in an unaffected region so that your data is safe and your application availability isn’t affected. So, cloud infrastructure companies help in making the infrastructure fault tolerant and provide services which are commonly referred to as Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery ( BCDR) plans.
Businesses need money for day-to-day operations, and when you have a large amount of money tied up in capital expenses, it can dramatically reduce the amount of money you can put toward your daily operations. In the on-premises model, a business purchases physical computer hardware to be used for its IT needs. Because these computers are physical assets that are intended to be used for more than one year, they are usually purchased as Capital expenditure. When you move to the cloud, you no longer rely on your on-premises computing hardware. Instead, you essentially rent hardware from the cloud service provider. Because you aren’t purchasing physical assets, you move your IT costs from capital expenses to operating expenses or day-to-day business expenses for your business.
Cloud offers three primary types of cloud services:
Infrastructure-as -a-Service (IaaS)
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Depending on your application/system usage, you can select one option. For Example, IaaS is a great choice if you want your application and configuration in the cloud, but you want the option of not paying for it when you’re not using it. By stopping the VM in the cloud, you can avoid the cost associated with it, and when you need it, you can simply start your VM and pick-up right from where you left off.
This way Cloud Computing always helps an organization at different levels and cloud models offer many economic benefits to an organization over the on-premises model, thereby making few reasons why businesses are rapidly moving to the cloud.
