Understand Cloud benefits with real life examples
Have you ever had difficulty explaining your work to your mother? This is what happened to me from the beginning of my career.
I worked for HP (Hewlett Packard) but never replaced a toner , for AXA but never sold an insurance policy and finally in the Cloud world (Informatica and Google Cloud) but not the clouds that bring rain.
For this reason I’ve decided to explain what are the main benefits that Cloud brings to Enterprises and people with real world examples.
For each of the benefits below, a metaphor will clearly explain the difference between the On-Premise approach versus the smarter Cloud one.
Scalability
Imagine that you have a small city car that fully satisfies your day by day needs, but once a year you need a larger car to go on vacations with four friends and all their luggages, what would you do?
On-Premise: you buy a van paying more for fuel, insurance policy and maintenance for the entire year using it only once a year.
Cloud: you rent and use a van just for the holidays when it’s really needed, keeping the comfort and the cheapness of your small city car for the rest of the year.
Business continuity
Assume that you’re working in a street food truck. Your french fries are great, but unexpectedly your fryer breaks during a crowded day with a lot of customers in front of you waiting for their food. What you can do?
On-Premise: you call the technician and wait some hours for him to come and fix the fryer.
Cloud: you leverage the backup fryer that you have in your truck and could be ready in some seconds to serve all your customers. By the way, the number of backup fryers is virtually unlimited ;)
Flexibility and no upfront commitment
You started taking picture with your smartphone and you’ve just discovered that photography could be your next best hobby. Now, it’s time to prove your skills with a professional camera. Which solution you will choose?
On-Premise: you buy the most professional and expensive camera that you can find at the electronics store. The risk is that your infatuation could be very similar to that time when you got it into your head of becoming a DJ and you bought a mixer that is just under your bed under a layer of dust.
Cloud: try the best reflex camera of your friend John who is working as a professional photographer just for some hours to understand if photography will be your next passion.
Security
Imagine that you have a gold ingot that it’s extremely valuable and your priority is to keep it secure and inaccessible to thieves. How do you protect your precious ingot?
On-Premise: you can install high security doors and a new and expensive alarm system at your home, but you’ll never achieve high security levels.
Cloud: you can bring your gold ingot to your preferred bank to store it securely leveraging the best security technologies and methodologies improved year over year by someone that is an actual expert of keeping things away from thieves.
Always up to date
You love technology and you would always have the last version of your smartphone?
On-Premise: you buy a new smartphone every month spending a thousand dollars every time or you accept to upgrade your smartphone only when it’s too old and the mobile apps stop working.
Cloud: you can subscribe to a service that periodically refreshes your mobile device very frequently every time a new version comes out and it’s automatically available in your pocket in a transparent manner.
Did you like the examples? And you? What other metaphors would you suggest?
