Clouds & Cloud Services from a business perspective – Understand the characteristics :
Scalability
Cloud computing allows for immediate scaling at any time without long-term commitment. More CPU, more memory, more storage the horsepower when you need it.
Security
Security is one of the concerns of this computing model.
With security becoming a core factor for organizations determining a cloud provider, many cloud vendors are emphasizing security from the get-go.
The large scale of cloud helps providers hire skilled professionals to put in the latest and best in measures and governance around the security, privacy and confidentiality of your infrastructure and services.
Hardware independence
Cloud computing is hardware agnostic, providing a convenient way of accessing computing services, independent of the hardware you use.
This model provides a high degree of flexibility and openness versus being boxed in to specific hardware platforms that may not adapt to changes over time.
Variable costs
One of the factors that appeals to consumers of cloud computing services is the benefit of variable costs.
With a variable cost basis, organizations can take more risks.
If cloud computing doesn’t work out, they can close the relationship/unsubscribe from the service at any time.
It’s a lot less risky than investing in capital and acquiring infrastructure or licenses and having to keep them, when they are no longer needed.
Time to market
Most businesses are faced with enormous pressure to accelerate time-to-market for new products and services while controlling costs.
In many organizations, IT staff are so busy maintaining critical production systems that setting up development, test and QA servers fall behind.
Cloud computing provides a rapid deployment model that enables applications to be setup in record time at a low cost. It makes resource provisioning dynamic and self-service.
Application development teams can now provision their own servers.
Even if the infrastructure team does it for them, it can still be done at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional models.
Distribution over the Internet
The Internet is one of the most reliable components of computing infrastructure.
Your Internet provider may occasionally have hiccups, but when compared to the rates of failures for disk drives, memory, cooling units, backup power, etc, in your internal datacenter, the uptime for the Internet is considerably higher.
In addition to uptime, the method of providing the computing resources via the Internet, is by itself, a major time and cost saving benefit.
