What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is on-demand access, via the internet, to computing resources—applications, servers (physical servers and virtual servers), data storage, development tools, networking capabilities, and more—hosted at a remote data center managed by a cloud services provider (or CSP). The CSP makes these resources available for a monthly subscription fee or bills them according to usage.

Benefits of Cloud Computing

• Scalability

Your business can scale up or scale down your operation and storage needs quickly to suit your situation, allowing flexibility as your needs change. Rather than purchasing and installing expensive upgrades yourself, your cloud computer service provider can handle this for you. Using the cloud frees up your time so you can get on with running your business.

• Excellent accessibility

Cloud allows us to quickly and easily access store information anywhere, anytime in the whole world, using an internet connection. An internet cloud infrastructure increases organization productivity and efficiency by ensuring that our data is always accessible.

• Cost Savings

Cost saving is one of the biggest Cloud Computing benefits. It helps you to save substantial capital cost as it does not need any physical hardware investments. Also, you do not need trained personnel to maintain the hardware. The buying and managing of equipment is done by the cloud service provider.

• Control choices

Organizations can determine their level of control with as-a-service options. These include software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

• Data Security

One of the major concerns of every business, regardless of size and industry, is the security of its data. Data breaches and other cybercrimes can devastate a company’s revenue, customer loyalty and brand positioning. Cloud offers many advanced security features that guarantee that data is securely stored and handled.

Challenges of Cloud Computing

• Lack of resources/expertise

One of the cloud challenges companies and enterprises are facing today is lack of resources and/or expertise. Organizations are increasingly placing more workloads in the cloud while cloud technologies continue to rapidly advance. Due to these factors, organizations are having a tough time keeping up with the tools. Also, the need for expertise continues to grow. These challenges can be minimized through additional training of IT and development staff.

• Downtime

Downtime is the common challenges of cloud computing as no cloud provider guarantees a platform that is free from downtime. Internet connection also plays an important role as if a company has an untrustworthy internet connection then there may be a problem as they can face downtime.

• Security of Data

In terms of security concerns of cloud technology, we don’t find answers to some questions. Mysterious threats like website hacking and virus attack are the biggest problems of cloud computing data security.
Before utilizing cloud computing technology for a business, entrepreneurs should think about these things. Once you transfer important data of your organization to a third party, you should make sure you have a cloud security and management system.

• Managing Multiple Clouds

81% of companies are having multi-cloud strategies and have a hybrid cloud structure (public and private clouds). Managing multi-cloud infrastructure contrary to a single cloud is very challenging given all the above data-driven challenges. Companies are opting for a multi-cloud scenario because some of the services are cost-effective in public and to manage cost-effectively this cloud model has been very successful in recent years. Managing such highly networked architecture is a difficult task.

• Interoperability

Cloud Service Provider’s (CSP) services should be flexible enough to integrate itself into other platforms and services provided by other CSPs. The data pipeline should be easy to integrate and should drive improved performance. There are a lot of challenges in Cloud Computing like Big data, long hall transfer, transferring data problems but still, it is the best computing resource available to date.

Conclusion

Despite all the Cloud Computing advantages and disadvantages, we can’t deny the fact that Cloud Computing is the fastest growing part of network-based computing. It offers a great advantage to customers of all sizes: simple users, developers, enterprises and all types of organizations. So, this technology here to stay for a long time.