Cloud Computing And Enterprises: What They Need To Know?

Companies, of any size, should not ignore cloud computing. It has the potential to significantly change IT and present enterprises with opportunities for growth and profitability. CIOs and IT Heads can remove the need for upfront capital investment, making operational costs more predictable and enabling organisations to respond more nimbly to variable business demands.

With the ever-increasing popularity of cloud models, we will witness traditional IT infrastructure thinning down and gradually moving up to the clouds. Cloud-based solutions are becoming more and more important these days and enterprise businesses are catching up.

Enterprise Cloud Computing

Enterprise cloud computing is a comprehensive solution for organisations which enable IT to be delivered as a service. All computing resources (software & hardware, storage & networking, etc) are provided rapidly to end users, as per their need. The key benefit of these solutions is that they possess the ability to be scaled up or down, so that users get the resources they need and pay only for what they use.

Enterprises can leverage three major types of cloud models: Public, private, and hybrid clouds.

Private Cloud

Private cloud is a technology initiative that provides hosted services to a limited number of people behind a firewall. Organisations who prefer to run things in-house can consider private clouds, which is a hardware package bundled together with intelligent software for requesting resources and having those resources allocated rapidly. Companies will get the ability to scale resources up and down as needed at any time and gain time-to-market benefits without ceding control, security, and recurring costs to a service provider.

Public Cloud

On the other hand, public cloud relies on cloud services by a third party provider. They exist beyond the company firewall, and they take complete responsibility for managing and securing an organisation's entire infrastructure.

In this setup, the cloud provider does the installation, management, provisioning, and maintenance of software, application infrastructure, or physical infrastructure resources.

It's War: Public Cloud vs. Private Cloud

As enterprises embrace the public or private cloud, the important question to decide is: Which applications should be kept internal?

The answer depends on this question: What is the organisation's risk acceptance level? The more critical the data, the more important it is to keep it in-house, and offload the routine, not part of the core business to public clouds.

Hybrid Clouds: Why not both?

Hybrid clouds are a combination of public and private clouds. In this model, an organisation might use a public cloud service for general computing but store customer data within its own data center (private cloud). The management responsibilities are split between the enterprise and public cloud provider where the organisation provides and manages some resources in-house and has others provided externally.

Cloud Computing on the Rise!!!

The IT industry and its services could significantly change in the coming months with new cloud offerings. Enterprises need to adopt the cloud in order to stay ahead of the curve. The cloud is not just about an IT initiative but about how it fundamentally changes business models.

More and more organisations will move to the cloud from to the perspective of improving their bottom-line returns and obtaining better outputs. The strategic investment on cloud services will help enterprises to better manage data complexity and size, reduce IT costs and dramatically simplify the design and installation of IT infrastructure.

Whether companies like it or not, change is HERE. As the number of products and services offerings in the cloud space continues to grow, it underscores the fact of where things are heading. It simply makes business sense to jump on the bandwagon and join in on the benefits that cloud services offer.