Benefits Of Cloud Computing

Flexibility

• Scalability: Cloud computing adds scalability to businesses of various sizes. Based on their budget and resource requirements, for instance, extra bandwidth or storage spaces, businesses can instantly scale up or down their computing resources seamlessly. By outsourcing the computing resources and infrastructure requirements to cloud service providers, organizations can avoid undergoing complex and expensive upgrades to IT resources, and have more time to devote to the more critical aspects of businesses.
• Storage: Users can opt for various cloud computing environments, private, public, hybrid, or multi-cloud storage offerings, based on their security requirements, application demands, and business-specific needs.
• Control choices: Cloud service providers offer multiple control choices with as-a-service options to select from, like platform-as-a-service (PaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS). Organizations can select from the control choices as per their level of control over corporate resources.
• Selection of pre-built tools: Users can get the flexibility of selecting the pre-built tools and features to suit their specific needs.
• Security features: Users can choose from a menu of security features like a virtual private cloud (VPC), encryption, and API keys. A cloud vendor monitors security in a more efficient manner than traditional in-house teams and continuously applies security fixes. Cloud service providers offer advanced security features like encryption of the data being transmitted over networks and stored in databases, access management, and authentication which help to ensure data security in the cloud computing environments.

Efficiency

• Accessibility: Users can access cloud-based applications and software from anywhere in the world, all they need is Internet-connected devices like smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Cloud computing enhances accessibility to information resources, thereby fueling functionality, promoting collaboration, and fostering innovation.
• Agility: Sluggish procurement processes and limited on-site hardware infrastructure can hamper application development and availability. With cloud computing, developers can obtain computing resources within minutes, test their ideas, and build application architecture with agility.
• Time to market: With cloud computing, users can get their applications to market quickly, thus reducing time to market dramatically, improving product development and customer experience, and recognizing revenue faster.
• Data security: Cloud computing helps you keep your critical data backed up to the cloud to make it easily accessible and safe. Cloud enables portability to your data, and you will not need external hard drives to store data. Data security is ensured as hardware failure does not lead to data loss.
• Pay-as-you-go model: Transitioning from legacy platforms to the cloud will make access to corporate data convenient – saving both time and money. As most cloud computing services are pay-as-you-go, i.e. on the ‘utility’ basis, you will pay for the features you need when you use them. For instance, the feature of data storage is offered on a pay-as-you-go basis, which means you will get the storage space needed to service your clients and pay for the same. Cloud computing uses remote resources, thus saving the organizations the overhead costs needed for manually managing the system and software upgrades, and the expense of servers, storage, and other critical IT resources.

Strategic Value

• Streamlined work: Cloud service providers manage the underlying infrastructure and IT requirements, thus enabling organizations to prioritize more critical aspects that require attention, like application development and other business needs.
• Regular updates: Manually managing organization-wide software updates taxes staff resources and adds significant cost. Cloud-based solutions provide automatic software updates to systems with advanced technology and enable organizations to use the latest software versions, and upgraded processing power. Regular updates are crucial so that systems and applications remain highly available and user experiences are not compromised.
• Disaster recovery: Security incidents and unplanned downtime in your services can negatively impact productivity and revenue. Integrating cloud-based services in your systems can help you accelerate data recovery in the occurrence of unfavorable situations like hardware or software failure, cyberattacks, and unexpected outages. Cloud-based disaster recovery solutions ensure IT resiliency, business continuity, and application availability.
• Collaboration: Cloud computing makes collaboration easy and effective. It enables team members to access and share information resources conveniently and securely across multiple cloud-based platforms worldwide. There are some cloud-based services that provide collaborative social spaces to connect employees from different departments of organizations and increase engagement.
• Competitive edge: Organizations opting for cloud-based solutions and services have competitive advantages over those who don’t. Organizations who prefer to manage IT resources, critical infrastructure, and software locally, without subscribing to cloud computing services face distinct disadvantages in terms of productivity, agility and security.