Has your Enterprise moved to CLOUD yet?

Before we bust the myths about Cloud computing and discuss further cloud strategy — let us understand the basics first.

Cloud computing or cloud services are basically services provided remotely for various use cases.

The services include storage, database, network, server, software, infrastructure, analytics, and much more.

It is where organizations rent a particular resource from a different company to use it remotely

This reduces the cost of infrastructure and helps the organizations improve quickly and gain steady profits.

In this blog post(with excerpts from #TGV50 [episode link in the first comment] ft. Pankaj Mishra), you will learn:

• Myths about cloud computing.
• IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS explained in layman’s terms
• Cloud as a service and benefits of cloud

Myths of cloud computing

• It is very cheap — It is, relative to the cost of having the actual physical infrastructure.
• It is less secure — Cloud is not a new technology, over the years IT and Security professionals have made sure that your data remains safe.
• It takes a lot of time — A proper vendor such as AWS or Azure will take care of all the aspects of moving towards the cloud, it doesn’t take more than a few days.

Adapting to cloud services helps you to save this capital and a lot of physical space as these centers require a separate room altogether. So how can we use the cloud in our business?

Let’s understand IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS with the help of an analogy.

Suppose you want to go from point A to B.

There are 4 ways you can do it.

The first option is to buy your own vehicle and use it. This is an example of a physical data center.

1. Infrastructure as a Service — In this case, you just rent a car for the period you use it and bear the cost of maintenance and fuel. (Google Compute Engine, Digital Ocean)
2. Platform as a Service — In this case, you will call a taxi and just pay for the distance for which you used it. (AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Microsoft Azure, Apache Stratos)
3. Software as a Service — In this case, you will use a means of public transport. This implies that you indeed used the service, but it wasn’t meant exclusively for you. (Dropbox, Google apps, Salesforce)

Earlier, it used to be quite a tedious task for setting up a data center for an organization. It included physical hardware, OS, virtual machines, and many more things. On top of that, many dedicated engineers to maintain this infrastructure were a necessity.

For a small to medium-sized company, In India, On average setting up a physical data center would cost 10–15 Lakh rupees.

Benefits of Cloud services:

• Saves capital — Pay only for what you use. There is no payment for the maintenance of the infrastructure.
• Enhanced Security — There are dedicated engineers just to make sure your data remains safe.
• Ease of access — Once the data is uploaded to cloud servers, employees can access it through any device and any place they desire.
• Analytics — With so much data in one place, organizations can hire cloud analysts to make improvements to their business model.
• Data recovery and loss prevention — As there is no local storage of data, data loss is very uncommon when using cloud services.
• Collaborative environment — Employees can easily view and share data as and when required.

And the list goes on…!

Thanks for reading.

We are sure your organization might already be using cloud services. Request you to share your views on cloud services and what kind of cloud strategy you recommend.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.