Cloud computing, a growing trend.
WHAT IS CLOUD COMPUTING
In the past few years, cloud has become a common word. In fact, According to the new Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Spending Guide, worldwide spending on public cloud services will grow at a 19.4% CAGR, from almost $70 billion in 2015 to more than $141 billion in 2019 with companies investing in cloud services for new competitive advantages. So what is cloud computing? To summarize it, it’s more or less when you store data and programs on a cloud instead of storing it on the hard drive of a computer. What do you need to access the data? An internet connection. So yes, it’s about sharing, storing, processing and managing resources delivered over a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet.
TYPES OF SERVICES OF CLOUD COMPUTING
Infrastructure as a service — IaaS
Here, we talk about offering services that are related to hardware. It’s getting basically using third party providers for hosting a hardware. It can be said that you are paying to access hardwares over the net, this can mean server or storage services. An example would be if you have a subscription with a hosting company to store files on their servers with a you pay per use model. Leading vendors:
Platform as a Service — PaaS
Here, you are getting a development platform on the cloud. What does that mean? You get access to a platform that allows you to develop and build applications that run on systems software or hardware that belong to other companies. For example, developing an ecommerce web that is running on a vendor’s server. Leading players:
Software as a service — SaaS
As its name says it, here, you get a complete software on the cloud. So you are running a complete application on the system of a third party, hosted on the cloud. A very common example would be a CRM system, here at Apiumtech we use ZOHO that enables us to get a sort of overview of our sales cycles. Leading players:
PRIVATE, PUBLIC & HYBRID
PRIVATE
A private cloud is when an infrastructure is either hosted on-site on a company’s intranet, or hosted in the data center of a service provider and the resources are not shared with other organizations. We use it to increase storage capacity and the power of the processor. It is often used by big companies with big amounts of data or that have strict regulations about their data and certain types of regulations. The main advantage of going for a private cloud is that it offers a higher level of control and security. Also, it’s more customisable and therefore adapter to the specific IT requirements of companies. In general, the disadvantage would be that the maintenance and management is part of the responsibility of the company.
PUBLIC
On the public cloud, the data of a company is stored in the data center of a third-party provider, on a shared hardware, and the storage and processor capacity are not owned by that company. Usually, small to medium sized companies use public cloud computing due to various advantages it provides them; as it’s not their hardware, it implies that there are no maintenance costs to the client and that they are not responsible for the management. Another advantage is that the time it takes for testing & deploying is decreased. Basically, it delivers agility, scalability and efficiency. Although security breaches are kind of rare, somes businesses get scared off by that when it comes to public cloud.
HYBRID
The name is quite clear, hybrid cloud is a mix of private & public cloud services, it’s almost as if you get the best of both! What is does is that is allows to move between both clouds and enables you to leverage the beast of what each one offers. The main advantage is that you get huge flexibility and much more options, you can for example put the most critical operations on the private cloud and the rest that on the public, increasing your agility.
5 BENEFITS OF CLOUD COMPUTING
By now you must have understood that with cloud computing you get many benefits. In a way you are enabling access to data from almost anywhere and with the growth of digital devices around us, we are just making it all more efficient and available. Here are the five main benefits provided by cloud computing:
1 — SOFTWARE UPDATE
With a purchased software you usually get yearly releases but when you’re using cloud computing services, it’s easy, you can get an upgraded system immediately. So you get the latest versions when they are released, including new features and functionalities and that on a regular base and with the latest technology. This can mean that you get up-to-date versions of software and upgrades to servers and processing power.
2 — REDUCE COSTS
Yes, you reduce the costs. Different costs. First of all, as companies have smaller (or none) data centers by using cloud computing, it implies that you reduce costs because you don’t need to buy equipment, hardware, facilities, utilities, etc. you reduce the number of servers and software costs. Other than that, you are also lowering the staff costs and system maintenance costs.
3 — FLEXIBLE EMPLOYEES
Granting access to your employees means that you are boosting their flexibility. In fact, you can access, edit and share data from anywhere you are, because you only need a device and an internet connection (some apps even work offline). Most of employees are quite happy when they know that they can take their work anywhere. Happy employees means higher productivity.
4 — FLEXIBLE CAPACITY
In fact, it’s much more flexible. You can play with your capacity, scale up or down your storage following your specific needs, may they be changing or not. If your needs increase or decrease, you really don’t need to worry about it.
5 — SECURITY
Obviously all businesses want to protect their data. There are many situations, which might rarely happen, but when they do, represent a tremendous problem as for example, natural disasters or power failures. Well with the cloud, everything is backed up in a secure place. This means that you can always access your data unless your device is broken or that you have no connection. But that’s not as big of a problem than losing the whole data, you just need to get another device. Your data is in the cloud, you can access it no matter what happens to your machine.
A FEW STATISTICS
- The private cloud use has increased from 63% to 77% and the hybrid cloud use will keep on increasing at a higher rate; it grew from 58% to 71%
- IDC researchers believe that hyper-convergence spending will almost double from $806.8M in 2015 to $1.6B in 2016
- Based on a study, the companies that started using cloud services have seen an increase in their time to market of 20.66%, an increase in efficiency of 18.80% and a reduction of IT spendings of 15.07%
- For 73% of companies, security of their data is still the biggest issue of cloud services
- According to Gartner, the use of IoT will drive $868B in spending in 2016
- The cloud storage market is expected to grow from $18.87B in 2015 to $65.41B by 2020
- According to Gartner, IoT devices are estimated to increase by 30% in 2016
CLOUD COMPUTING TRENDS IN 2016
CLOUD-NATIVE APPS
The development of native apps keeps on increasing and cloud providers are more and more focusing on how to provide services for those applications that are more complex and that need things like time-based analytics, omni-channel support, and microservice support.
IOT WILL INCREASE
You probably all know what IoT is and how much it grew in the past year. Well, it’s still the beginning. In 2016, it has been estimated that IoT devices will increase by 30%.
HYBRID CLOUD
In 2015, the use of hybrid cloud has continued to grow and is expected to grow even more in 2016.
FEAR OF SECURITY
The fear of security will continue to grow as the cloud usage keeps on increasing and is starting to be adopted by more and more companies due to its great benefits. The more data will be on the cloud the bigger the fear will be.
IMPORTANCE OF CONTAINERS
When talking about next-generation cloud applications, containers are very important. In the last two years, many companies have started using container technologies like Docker, to help them standardize the way they package and deploy code. This technology is crucial to agile development and to microservice architectures. As we will get more applications directed towards microservices, container platforms that run microservices will be more on demand.
IT NEEDS CLOUD ANALYTICS
IT departments will be in a way dependent of data analytics solutions because as cloud computing keeps on increasing, there has to be a sort of verification that those benefits are real. Is it really increasing productivity? Is it really reducing costs? Well that’s when cloud analytics solutions comes in. It will me more in demand obviously to help IT professionals monitor changes.
HYPER CONVERGED PLATFORMS
As the demand for the cloud services is that high and will continue on growing, scalability and maintenance costs are therefore more and more important. To benefit those two factors, hyper converged platforms will be more used for cloud architecture in 2016.
BIG PLAYERS ON THE CLOUD
Cloud is not see as if it’s only for small companies anymore. Huge players have started to notice the advantages and facility of it, the fact that it cuts costs and risks. So yes, we will continue on seeing the transitions of infrastructures into the cloud.
EASY PEASY
Last year we saw many self service solutions and in 2016, data will become more and more easy to push on the cloud without having a technical background. Hopefully we will soon say goodbye to the complexity of data integration & transformation, it might be more of a copy/paste action.
STANDARDS OF SECURITY
As there are much more companies using the cloud for their business and that it’s a growing trend, there will be more security standards that will try to get better migration to the cloud and therefore encouraging more businesses to integrate and adopt the cloud.
Originally published at apiumtech.com on April 28, 2016.
