Progress and innovation have resulted in amazing technology solutions that have entirely redefined the way we think, interact and do things in our day to day lives. Nowadays we communicate virtually, we drive electrically, we shop online and more astonishing, we store our data in clouds!
Cloud computing is undoubtedly the future for many industries. This market has been growing exponentially over the course of the last five years; incredibly much faster than IT experts had predicted. According to research firm Forrester, public cloud should be a $236 billion market by 2020.
Many companies have already understood the benefits of a cloud service and have invested large funds in this technology.
There are different types of cloud computing that all have a similar goal which is to deliver on-demand computing resources. Everything from simple consumer applications to large enterprise products, all delivered over the internet on a pay-for-use basis.
Software as a Service or SaaS is a very common type of cloud computing; we can also refer to it as end-user applications. All applications are accessible using a web browser with no location restriction, no installation required and no maintenance hassles. The user is the one deciding how and where they want the software to be used.
Cloud computing is a much more economical and scalable way to store and analyse data. In this day and age, companies should no longer be dedicating valuable resources on managing their own data centre and custom software setups. All their efforts and concerns should be about the quality of the service that they deliver and the satisfaction of their customers.
It is likely that your business will quickly become totally reliant on its new cloud-based SaaS platform. Cloud server downtime could seriously impact numerous parts of your business operations. As such it is important to ensure that your cloud provider has a Service Level Agreement in place to ensure downtimes are kept to an absolute minimum. An SLA of 99% uptime or greater is highly recommended.
Finally, you can sometimes encounter issues when migrating from one cloud platform to another. It can be extremely costly to reconfigure applications to suit the requirements of the new host.
Nothing is perfect but, the advantages provided by cloud computing are undoubtedly a game changer for businesses!
Who knew that clouds had such potential!
