Top 7 most common uses of cloud computing – For some time now, cloud computing has been recognized as the most increasing and competitive through greater flexibility, cost reduction, optimal resource utilization and elasticity. Most people are usually searching for uses of cloud computing. Therefore, these are few circumstances where cloud computing is used to improve the ability to achieve different type of business goals. Lets look at the example uses of cloud computing in our daily lives.
1. Platform as a service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
First and foremost, when it comes to Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), making use of an existing infrastructure on a pay-per-use system appears to be a clear choice for organizations saving on the cost of investing to purchase, manage and maintain an Information Technology infrastructure. In a like manner, there are also cases where companies turn to Platform as a service (PaaS) for the same reasons while also in search of a way to increase the speed of development on a ready-to-use platform to install applications.
2. Hybrid cloud and Private cloud
When you look at some of the many reasons for using cloud, you will notice that there are two circumstances where companies are searching for ways to assess some of the applications they intend to deploy into their environment through the use of a cloud (precisely a public cloud). Despite the fact test and development may be limited in time, implementing a hybrid cloud approach permits users to test application workloads, so as to provide the comfort of an environment without the first investment that might have been reduced to nothing in case the workload testing fail.
That’s not all, another use of hybrid cloud is similarly the ability to expand during periods of limited peak usage, which is sometime better to hosting a big infrastructure that might rarely be of use. A company would seek to have an added availability of an environment and capacity when required on a pay-as you-go basis.
3. Development and Test
This is perhaps the best situation for the use of a cloud is the development and test environment. Furthermore, it involves securing an affordable budget, setting up your environment through physical assets, available time and significant manpower. After that, comes the deployment/installation and configuration of your cloud platform. With that, all this can over and over again, extend the time it takes for a project to be completed and stretch the user’s milestones.
Actually, with cloud computing, there are now readily available environments personalized for every user’s needs. This frequently combines, but is not restricted to an automated provisioning of virtualized and physical resources.
4. Big data analytics
If you ask me, I will say, one of the features obtainable by leveraging cloud computing is the ability to tap into huge quantities of both unstructured and structured data to harness the benefit of extracting business worth.
Suppliers and Retailers are currently mining information derived from consumers’ buying patterns to directly target their online and offline marketing and advertising campaigns to a particular segment of the population. Most social networking platforms (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn) are now providing the basis for analytics on behavioral patterns that companies are using to derive significant information.
5. Data and File storage
If you decide to use the cloud, it can offer you the possibility of storing your personal files. After that, you can easily access, and retrieve them from any web-enabled interface from any location. Furthermore, the cloud web service interfaces are usually simple to operate at any time. To tell the truth, you will have scalability, speed, high availability, and security for your environment. Also, in this setting, businesses are only paying for the amount of cloud storage they are really consuming. They do so without the worries of managing the daily maintenance of the storage infrastructure.
There is also the possibility to store the data either on or off premises depending on the regulatory compliance requirements. Data is stored in virtualized pools of storage hosted by a third party based on the customer specification requirements.
6. Disaster recovery
How does seem when you lose data/files in your computer to hackers without having the ability to get them back? With that in mind, disaster recovery is yet another benefit derived from using cloud. Based on the cost effectiveness of a disaster recovery (DR) solution that provides faster recovery from a mesh of different physical locations at a much lower cost that the native DR site with rigid procedures, fixed assets and an expensive cost.
7. Backup to Remote Servers
Backing up data to remote servers has always been a time-consuming and complex operation. You will agree that this involves (i) maintaining a set of tapes or drives, (ii)manually collecting them and (iii) dispatching them to a backup facility with all the inherent problems that might happen in between the originating and the backup site. Generally speaking, this new method of ensuring a backup is performed is not immune to problems such as running out of backup media. Going forward, there is also time to load the backup devices for a restore operation, which takes time and is prone to human errors and malfunctions.
In conclusion, Cloud-based backup, while not being the complete remedy, is certainly a far cry from what it used to be some time ago. Now, you can robotically dispatch data to any location across the wire with the assurance that neither, availability, capacity nor security can be an issue.
Finally, while the list of the above uses of cloud computing is not exhaustible, it surely give an reason to use the cloud when comparing to more traditional alternatives to increase information technology (IT) infrastructure flexibility, as well as leverage on mobile computing and big data analytics.
