I am sure you are familiar with the term cloud computing, but what is it, and are services changing? Cloud computing means renting computing services online as needed, paying only for what you use. Companies can rent access to applications and storage from a cloud provider instead of owning their own equipment or data centers.
Cloud computing services can be used for a wide range of applications, including file storage and retrieval, database management, and network security. But what does the future of the cloud hold?
These cloud applications — from file storage and database management to network security — don’t exist in isolation; they’re delivered through distinct service models that shape how organizations access and manage their technology. The three main cloud computing service models — Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) — each represent a different layer of responsibility and control, defining precisely what the provider manages versus what your team handles. Understanding this framework is essential before we map out where the cloud is headed next.
In this post, we will look at what cloud computing is, what the future may hold and what cloud computing services are changing.
Why Is It Called Cloud Computing?
The cloud IT infrastructure is made up of servers connected in a network, hosted in various data centers around the world. Users can access these IT resources through cloud software, apps, and web browsers. If your device has internet access, you can use software and data stored in the cloud.
But why is it called cloud computing and denoted by the cloud symbol?
Cloud computing was created to connect devices and computers without needing physical interaction. So, no matter where the computers locate, they can be linked with a compatible interface. The concept of this virtual network was later named the Cloud as a metaphor for the internet. It is called so as access to cloud computing environments is location-independent, meaning anyone with network connectivity can use the cloud system and store data.
History of Cloud Computing
You might think that cloud computing is a recent trend, but the development of this widely-used technology has a long history.
In the 1950s, mainframe technology began, acting like an early computer. It was the basis of today’s computing, linking terminals over an internal network. Time-sharing allowed many users to access mainframes, even though the stations had no processing power. This non-local storage technique started flourishing as it hit the research society.
The technology evolved, and in 1961, the pioneer of today’s cloud technology, John McCarthy, shared his time-sharing theory that emphasised distributing computing resources virtually among several users and first used the term Artificial Intelligence.
John McCarthy’s AI idea was refined by J.C.R. Licklider, who proposed the Intergalactic Computer Network theory in 1960, laying the foundation for the modern internet. Using Licklider’s idea of a network connecting individual computers, Bob Taylor and Larry Robert created ARPANET in 1969, allowing computers to share resources over long distances.
In the decades following the 1970s, there was a sharp rise in technological evolution leading to the development of Virtual Machines (VMs), and many telecommunication companies started renting VPN services.
Technology became more affordable by 1990, and enterprises started connecting their own computers over the internet. Soon after the first-ever release of SaaS services (to deliver web apps as services via the internet) by the tech-giant Salesforce in 1999, the trend to host and serve video and music content online started skyrocketing.
More businesses like AWS, Microsoft, etc., were focusing on selling IT resources virtually. By the mid-1990, cloud technology started flourishing, and the evolution of PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS models made it thrive like never before. It quickly replaced traditional servers in finance, education, and healthcare, modernizing these industries.
Though J.C.R. Licklider first envisioned cloud technology in the 1960s, the term ‘Cloud Computing’ first appeared in a Compaq document in 1996.
Cloud technology evolved at a breathtaking speed in the last decade. It got fueled by the development of Amazon EC2 that allowed end-users to hire virtual computers and run their own applications/programs on them.
Businesses and individuals are turning to cloud solutions for outsourcing their data handling hassles to secured cloud solutions. In 2018, around 3.6 billion people worldwide were using cloud solutions, with the number rising at a head-spinning pace.
As per a recent forecast, Gartner predicts the global consumers paying for public cloud resources will increase by 23.1% to a total of 332.3 billion dollars, up from 270 billion dollars in 2020.
How is Cloud Computing Different?
Cloud computing has enabled businesses and CIOs to get out of the siloed nature of conventional physical data centers. In a traditional approach, it seems a mammoth task to ensure optimal interaction among the running devices that often lead to resource wastage.
Moreover, on-premises physical servers often lead to data security risks as they require around-the-clock system monitoring by IT experts. The result is, implementing an on-site physical server becomes too cumbersome, highly expensive, and disorganised when elasticity and agility are the keys to uninterrupted company development.
On the flip side, cloud platforms allow you to hire IT infrastructure rather than spending thousands on deploying it on-premises. Cloud computing is better than traditional servers because it offers unlimited processing power and storage online.
As most of the time, you only pay for using an IT system managed, controlled, and maintained by a third-party provider in cloud computing, these cloud services are a far more scalable, flexible, and efficient way of handling business workloads.
Let’s look over how cloud computing is different from traditional approaches:
- Cloud computing ensures auto-program of server personality, system configuration, and IT resources via hardware virtualisation.
- Cloud models are configured with infrastructure resources so that the services meet regulatory compliances, workload specifications, etc.
- This network-based centralised framework ensures provisioning the right amount of hardware and comes with effortless migration that accelerates agility and robustness in a business.
So why are enterprises of all sizes switching to cloud solutions so rapidly?
The answer is, it really pays off the investment by enabling business owners to leverage the power of centralised resource pooling technology modern cloud services stand on and automate the business operations.
Some cloud services that most leading enterprises use include:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Microsoft Azure
- IBM Cloud
- Google Cloud
- Salesforce
- Slake
- Microsoft 365
- Workplace by OS33
What Makes Cloud Computing So Desirable?
The cloud is getting more and more popular day by day. But what makes this network-based technology so desirable?
Let’s look over some desirable features of this flourishing technology:
- On-demand Self Service: It is one of the promising features that make cloud services so demanding nowadays. Cloud services are on-demand, meaning end-users can automatically provision computing resources and powers based on their requirements without interacting with the vendor. The on-demand feature of the cloud architecture also enables users to monitor cloud server capacities and the assigned network storage effortlessly.
- Broad Network Access: Cloud resources can be accessed over the internet using standard devices. It has allowed end-users to use cloud services remotely via heterogeneous thick and thin client platforms: smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc.
- Resource Pooling: Cloud services run on centralised resource polling that enables providers to distribute and redistribute computing power and resources among multiple end-users isolated from each other. It is the base of the cloud multi-tenancy scheme that has made cloud services so scalable and cost-efficient.
How Cloud Computing Works
The core technology behind cloud computing is virtualisation that enables third-party vendors to provide end-users with existing physical hardware.
It makes a hypervisor software function as a hardware system without having the hardware in place and simulates a virtual computing environment through hardware abstraction of IT resources. This digitally-present computing environment that imitates a physical computer is called a virtual machine or instance.
In a cloud computing environment, multiple cloud instances run on the same physical server, also called a host or bare metal hardware, but are isolated from each other with the help of the hypervisor software.
A single physical server that multiple instances run on together acts as a cluster of virtual servers, where each virtual server runs its own OS. It is called server virtualisation.
Virtualisation software also enables many different programs and Operating Systems to run on a single computer concurrently. These OSs operate identically to an OS hosted on a physical computer. It thus reduces hardware expenses and boosts the effectiveness of your existing hardware.
As your system and applications get backed up in at least two servers of the centralised cloud system, even if the server handling your workload goes down, there is always another server to keep your operations going without any interruption.
Types of Cloud Computing
Cloud environments offer software developers and IT authorities the power to concentrate on what matters most to boost business productivity and avoid undifferentiated tasks like system administration, procurement, updating security patches, and more. As cloud platforms are flourishing fast, several deployment options have emerged to ensure better feasibility, cost-optimisation, and meet business specifications.
Let’s look over three main types of cloud computing:
- Public Cloud: Owned and controlled by the cloud providers, a public cloud environment is a widely-used cloud IT infrastructure where a vast array of computing resources, for instance, RAM, CPU, storage capacity, networking, and more, are delivered over the public network. You can also opt for managed cloud services, including cloud security services and database management. The public cloud model functions based on the cloud multi-tenancy system where despite getting served by a single VM, no user can access the data/information of other users.
- Private Cloud: A private cloud infrastructure is solely possessed and administered by a single user or company. It can be located at the company’s own data center using its own hardware system or hosted off-premises in a private cloud provider’s data center. For the second case, IT resources are delivered from a remotely controlled data center.
- Hybrid Cloud: A hybrid cloud comprises at least one public cloud environment with one private system and is accessible via VPN or a company’s private network. So you can avail of unlimited cloud storage from the public cloud platform and depend on the private cloud infrastructure for handling your core data processing. A hybrid cloud solution comes with better feasibility and flexibility than the other two models. For instance, if your private cloud model runs out of computing resources or power, you can leverage the power of your public system.
What is Cloud Computing Services Changing in the Business
Cloud technology has led to a boom in the business world over the last decade. Businesses, be it small, mid-size, or large, started switching to cloud solutions to scale their business by leasing a more secure IT infrastructure. Small and mid-sized companies can use big data analytics to understand market trends and take advantage of unlimited cloud storage.
Cloud services are expected to replace physical servers, dominating e-commerce and daily activities soon. After evaluating 150 IT experts and global companies, Denodo found that the percentage of enterprises migrating to cloud computing increased by 25%, from 15.48% in 2020 to 19.35% in 2021.
Let’s look over how cloud technology is changing the way businesses operate:
Everything is More Efficient on the Cloud
A prerequisite to business flourishment is to become borderless and offer services to global customers through presenting them on the web. Hence, even traditionally run companies are trying to cater their services online and reach the target audience better. But businesses that want to serve global customers require a massive data storage capacity to run efficiently, which seems to be the biggest challenge in traditional data storage approaches.
The solution here is the managed cloud solutions that are highly flexible and enable end-users to scale their resource usage as required. What is more impressive is, businesses only have to pay for the services they use and opt for the pay-as-you-go option.
The scalability coming with cloud services has also made large companies host their data and applications in the cloud. The use of different cloud-based productivity tools is skyrocketing by offering a remote yet highly flexible working environment, better tracking and reporting, workflow management, and more for better business productivity. Thus, this modular approach to scale workload in cloud technology offers businesses real-time benefits over a more reliable virtual infrastructure.
Cloud Ensures Effective Customer Support
No matter how quality service you offer online, unless you ensure top-notch customer assistance, you cannot succeed. Cloud services can also come into use here by helping companies deliver round-the-clock customer service.
Again, different cloud platforms can help you understand your customer demand and expectations better by consolidating all data from all sources your business is present, into one intuitive dashboard. By using predictive models to process and analyse the consolidated data, companies can make better data-driven decisions. So they can understand the market and serve customers better, resulting in increased ROI.
No Infrastructure Needed Means Everyone Can Grow
One of the biggest facts CIOs love about cloud technology is that it enables them to expand and scale their businesses without building any IT infrastructure. In the past, the more robust IT infrastructure and computing clusters a company could set up, the more chances it would have to grow and stay ahead in the competition.
Shifting workloads to the cloud means businesses no longer need to build on-site IT systems; instead, they can lease the IT resources from cloud vendors and expand their businesses at a breathtaking speed. So no matter if you have just launched your very first business online or own a big company, you have much room to grow with cloud technology.
For example, if you run a video company, you may need a lot of time in animation rendering. However, when you switch to the cloud, you have access to unlimited animation rendering power that will ultimately deduct the time required by half.
When Your Data Lives in the Cloud, Everything Keeps Going
The data your business stores in the cloud is always available to your staff, making it effortless for them to work from anywhere at any time. All they need is internet connectivity and compatible devices, and they can share files, edit them in real-time or communicate among the team, enjoying a remote yet efficient workplace. It is particularly beneficial if you run a global company with staff from all over the world.
This facility to work remotely might not seem significant, but cloud technology helps employees stay connected to their work.
Cloud Expenses Keeps IT Overhead Lean
Cloud computing has provided startups, mid-sized and expanding businesses with room to develop by enabling them to save on operating and capital expenditure to a great extent.
In the cloud, the provider pays the expenses, not the user. It seems overwhelming for many small or even big companies to set up robust IT infrastructure housing everything, from hardware to adapters and wires. And the amount they have to pay the IT experts every month for the system upgrade or maintenance only adds up to this cost. Most organisations cannot afford to spend so much on in-house IT setup.
On the flip side, businesses can outsource most of their IT responsibilities to cloud providers without installing any on-premises infrastructure. Since they can save on both CapEx and OPEX while boosting their competencies and driving innovation concurrently, they can grow faster- resulting in an ultimate increase in ROI.
More Disaster Resistant Means More Robustness
How a disaster, calamity, or sudden system disruption can lead your business to incur a heavy loss by making you lose all business data stored in your on-premises storage disks is beyond description. Backing up business data and infrastructure has been in practice for a long, but the process has become more convenient with cloud computing.
Thanks to cloud virtualisation technology and CDR services that clone your system and all data securely in cloud centers. This allows immediate recovery and protected access to your critical systems.
Cloud Disaster Recovery services enable companies to harness the dynamism of cloud technology for instant failover and spin-up, paying only a fraction of the cost they have to spend on traditional backup systems.
The Future of Cloud Computing
With 94% of workloads expected to use cloud computing in 2021, predicting its future evolution is challenging. But it is evident that cloud computing will be, in the nearer future, at the forefront of all advanced technologies to resolve all major business issues. Let’s look over how the future of cloud computing may hold:
ML and AI will Revolutionise Cloud Technology
It is forecast that, by the end of 2021, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will drive cloud technology to its highest potential. We can already notice how the PaaS and SaaS cloud has democratised AI, ML, and IoT by making them accessible and affordable to everyone. Enterprises of all sizes will be able to leverage the power of AI capabilities to innovate, run more efficiently and make insightful and data-driven decisions by automating repetitive tasks and streamlining workloads.
What Statista prognosticates is more impressive. It predicts that by 2025, the global value of the AI business will be more than $89 billion in a year. A notable percentage of that price will come from AI-powered cloud services.
The integration of Machine Learning with the cloud, what we call the Intelligent Cloud, will take over the world by improving cognitive computing power, advancing chatbot technology, data processing, and making cloud data centers operate more efficiently.
Cloud Will Move Towards Edge Computing
Edge computing aims to consolidate, analyse and process data near to where it is produced rather than in a centralised data warehouse to minimise latency and address some leading IoT challenges like network congestion.
As AI, ML, and IoT integrate more with the cloud, businesses will shift to edge computing. This allows optimized web applications, real-time analytics, and network resources via IoT devices. Leading cloud providers like IBM and Dell now focus on doubling down on network edge computing with cloud tools that would be implementable anywhere and bridge the gap between end-users and the centralised cloud technology.
Demand for Multi-cloud and Hybrid Cloud will Increase
The demand for cross-platform integration is rapidly increasing. Public cloud services will remain important, but businesses will also use private, hybrid, and multi-cloud models for more flexibility.
Rise of the Cloud Native
With the sharp rise in the adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud, using cloud-native technology is the call of the time for faster cloud deployment and running scalable applications and programs on different cloud environments.
But why is cloud-native architecture so significant? Let’s look over what makes cloud-native technology so promising:
- Containerisation: A cloud-native application is containerised meaning, it enables programs to be ‘written once and run anywhere,’ and workloads can shift between the cloud environments. Its portability facilitates the software delivery pipeline and includes encapsulating or packaging up software and application code to make them operate consistently on any cloud architecture.
- Microservices: Cloud-native architecture is built as an infrastructure of microservices: a combination of multiple small applications, each placed in a container that, while strung together, form a whole and fully functional application. Developing small microservices require minimum custom programming that makes software development much more agile and effortless. Moreover, developers can add or interchange microservices without executing lengthy integration trials.
- Orchestration: Orchestration is the third layer in the cloud-native landscape that enables developers to avoid the complexity and system load variations and opt for an automated process for feasible container management. Though managing a single service manually may seem easy, when you have so many containers containing hundreds of microservices, a quality orchestration tool like Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, etc., is more viable.
Cloud Computing Cost
Initially, it may seem that switching to a cloud environment would literally break your bank. But the benefits coming with these virtual services are really worth the investment. However, how much you have to pay for opting for a cloud service can be a factor of the following:
- What type of cloud environment do you want to deploy: public, private, hybrid, or multi-cloud?
- Would you store your business data or the entire infrastructure?
- Why do you want to migrate to cloud computing?
The cost includes the price for network and infrastructure maintenance, network hardware, and more. For example, you may have to pay around £290/month/server or £11000/month for your entire infrastructure if you need a colo facility to hire space for hardware and servers.
How Secure is Cloud Computing?
Like 80% of users out there, you might be thinking about the security of your data before storing it in CSP-owned and controlled servers. But the truth is, your photos, essential files, and data are far more secure in cloud servers than your computer’s hard disk or smartphone.
But how does cloud computing ensure better security against data loss, data breaches, and cyber-attacks? Let’s take a look:
- Regular Security Updates: Often, regularly updating your cloud security system comes by default with your plan. As the cloud servers are updated with top-notch data protection measures, you can be assured that your data is stored in a highly encrypted and upgraded system. Also, AI-powered cloud services, coming with built-in algorithms, can detect security vulnerabilities better and help take necessary measures.
- Built-in Firewall: Cloud vendors encrypt the network with advanced firewalls besides standard SSL/TLS encryption. This software/hardware-based cloud-deployed security tool can filter out potentially malicious traffic and block unauthorised access to safeguard your network and make it harder for scammers to breach the system and steal your sensitive data.
- Third-party Security Testing: To ensure your data is highly encrypted, cloud vendors also use third-party security services to verify their servers are updated with the latest and effective security layers and free from malware and viruses.
Cloud vendors implement cutting-edge security measures to ensure your data is always protected as workloads and applications get shifted among cloud environments for better agility. However, you too should take some steps to compensate for what the provider lacks in – cloud security is always a shared responsibility.
- Rely on a provider that implements advanced encryption measures to safeguard your data.
- Enable two-step verification upon any log-in attempt.
- You can always opt for a cloud security service that offers better visibility, real-time threat detection, more for your on-prem cloud infrastructure.
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