While we are busy in the routines of our busy lives, we forget how different those routines are from that of our forefathers from a generation or two ago. We stream our favorite movies or TV shows, or stream music, or order stuff online, or make video calls with people halfway around the world, and so forth.
All of these things would be beyond the wildest imaginings of our ancestors — or even those tribes who continue to live in the Amazon rainforest or in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands.
Many of the “apps” we have become used to over the past decade or so — Netflix, Dropbox, Spotify, etc. — benefit from cloud technologies. But beyond just those applications, organizations have benefited massively by having access to different public cloud solutions.
Organizations have been able to innovate faster and more organizations have been able to participate in innovation as cost-effective public cloud pricing has made innovation and risk-taking more affordable.
It’s also worth mentioning how cloud solutions enabled smooth functioning of organizations via enabling remote work — healthcare professionals.
In this article, we take a look at why organizations need pubic cloud or how public cloud solutions benefit businesses across several different verticals.
Table of contents:
What Makes Public Cloud an Indispensable Ally for Businesses
Public Cloud is Scalable, Flexible, and Cost-Effective
Public Cloud Enables Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery (BCDR)
Public Cloud Helps Implement AI/ML And Powers Big Data Insights
Public Cloud Improves Security
Public Cloud Improves Collaboration
Getting Started with Public Cloud
The Case for Public Cloud (From Ace Cloud Hosting)
Table of Contents
What Makes Public Cloud an Indispensable Ally for Businesses
While public cloud solutions bring business benefits to organizations irrespective of their size, cloud is particularly useful for small and medium businesses (SMBs). The flexibility and scalability offered by public cloud solutions are of great benefit to startups and other businesses operating in a challenging and competitive business environment. The cost effectiveness of public cloud solutions compared to on-premises set-up or private cloud is another major core benefit of cloud.
Small organizations benefit from the security provided by cloud — most public cloud solution providers have in-built security against DDoS attacks, ransomware attacks as also other advanced cloud security solutions such as cloud firewall.
In a time of a global pandemic — a once-in-a-century event — the remote work and remote collaboration that public cloud enabled has been a great enabler of business continuity at a quite fundamental level.
From a traditional Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery (BCDR) perspective as well, having data and applications on public cloud enables faster recovery from any disaster apart from making the implementation of BCDR plans more affordable and therefore more accessible to more businesses.
With public cloud providers adopting various environment-friendly measures in terms of how they cool their server rooms or going for 100% clean, renewable energy to power their servers and other equipment, by adopting public cloud solutions, organizations are also automatically adopting environment-friendly business practices that’ll help organizations meet their ESG priorities, objectives, and/or obligations.
Let us look in detail at major benefits of public cloud solutions.
Public Cloud is Scalable, Flexible, and Cost-Effective
Millions of SMBs benefit from pubic cloud because of the scalability offered by public cloud solutions. Typically, public cloud providers will have various configurations of their compute resources (virtual machines or VMs). Organizations can opt for any configuration that will meet their compute requirements.
For businesses running AI/ML workloads, there might be a need for high-powered GPUs rather than just CPUs. With the scalable nature of public cloud, businesses can subscribe to various cloud services on a monthly basis.
Thus, as the business requirements change, organizations can also change their cloud subscription levels and not worry about incurring huge up-front capital expenditures.
If you are a software testing company and need large compute resources to quickly complete a project, you can provision extra cloud resources only for a month. Once the project is complete, you no longer pay for those resources.
This is cheaper than arranging on-premises servers, networking hardware, and software licenses. You also do not have to worry about updating software up-to-date or having adequate antivirus protection or antimalware protection or firewalls — the cloud provider takes care of all!
Beyond this scalable aspect of public cloud solutions, there’s also the flexible aspect of it.
So, to continue with the example of a software testing company, if your test/QA team is spread globally, they can log in to their work environments from any device of their choice. Public cloud has enabled and accelerated remote work/flexible work to a remarkable extent and in a significant manner.
Businesses and organizations that had been early adopters of public cloud had little trouble adjusting to the work-from-home situation during the pandemic.
Whereas late adopters had to get on the public cloud bandwagon when the pandemic led to shutdowns and creative solutions had to be found in a hurry. Apart from being scalable and flexible, public cloud solutions are also cost-effective.
When it comes to your core computer, storage, and networking hardware, you have two options: either you can create the infrastructure on-premises or go for a cloud option. Setting everything up in-house will obviously cost tons of money and will be a huge CAPEX.
There’s not only the initial large investment in hardware and software but the subsequent and recurring expense in updates and maintenance.
With public cloud solutions, everything becomes the responsibility of the public cloud provider. The public cloud pricing can be as low as $50 — per user per month, and thus is the most cost-effective option.
Public Cloud Enables Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery (BCDR)
From floods and earthquakes to ransomware and other unforeseen events, businesses face many possible kinds of disasters which can lead to permanent loss of data. Nonrecoverable data loss events have led to businesses shutting down.
Thus, it’s better to have a professional plan in place to ensure business continuity under any circumstances. Nonrecoverable data loss events can leads to the business shutting down — .
With cloud backup of data in place, businesses can get back on their feet quite promptly by recovering their data after some disaster strikes. Minimal or low downtime is a sign that a business is serious about running a professional set-up.
Public cloud solutions offer several storage options for organizations and subscribing to some of those storage/backup options will ensure your business turns out to be among the lucky ones when some disaster inevitably strikes.
Public Cloud Helps Implement AI/ML And Powers Big Data Insights
You no longer have to be a Fortune 100 company to derive valuable business insights from big data. Running machine learning algorithms requires extreme computing capabilities which may be difficult to set-up on premises — this is where public cloud solutions offer the perfect answer with their GPUs/high performance computing capabilities available with pay-as-you-use public cloud pricing models.
Whether it’s text-to-speech or speech-to-text or natural language processing or image recognition or translation or recommendation engines — to cite a few instances of commonplace big data applications in business — the ease of deployment/provisioning of compute resources along with monthly billing brings the power of big data analytics within the grasp of SMBs and AI/ML startups.
You no longer have to be a multi-billion-dollar business to derive business benefits from the latest AI/ML algorithms or data-driven decision-making capabilities.
Public Cloud Improves Security
Ransomware attacks can be financially ruinous apart from damaging your reputation as a business. Organizations in finance and healthcare domains in particular have to comply with regulatory guidelines such as HIPAA and PCI-DSS. GDPR are applicable if you are doing business in Europe.
When businesses consider transferring their data or workloads/applications to public cloud, they worry about security of public cloud solutions.
In fact, serious public cloud providers provide robust data security, have adequate and advanced security measures in place, and ensure that they meet HIPAA, PCI-DSS and other regulatory requirements and compliance standards.
Which is why even the most highly regulated and security-obsessed businesses and verticals are on the cloud.
Helpful Read: What is Public Cloud
Public Cloud Improves Collaboration
It’s not uncommon for software development or software testing startups or SMBs to have staff operating from North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Asia.
When personnel from four continents are working as part of the same team, it’s critical that the applications, data and computer resources be on the cloud so that they are accessible from anywhere and anytime.
This is precisely where public cloud is the unbeatable choice with public cloud solutions in compute, storage, and other infrastructure that enables global collaboration. All anyone needs is the right login credentials to log in to their virtual machine (VM) and you are good to go!
With the right cloud security in place, nothing can empower DevOps more or foster greater productivity than public cloud solutions.
Getting Started with Public Cloud
While the great majority of organizations are already on the cloud, if you are considering migrating some of your workloads to public cloud, you might want to look at some cloud migration challenges and strategies.
You will want to have a checklist for your cloud migration project and carefully consider different cloud migration options such as rehosting, refactoring and so forth and choose what fits your needs best.
The Case for Public Cloud (From Ace Cloud Hosting)
Technology has played the role of a savior since the pandemic — a time of rapid change and colossal innovation across a broad swath of businesses. Businesses have had to revisit many of their established ways of doing things to come up with solutions that’ll enable them to conduct their business with agility while innovating @ scale and with speed.
If you find the idea of a public cloud that is built using open standards to ensure there won’t be any vendor lock-in to be attractive, then Ace Cloud Hosting’s OpenStack-based solution is a fine option.
Unlike some other cloud service providers, our contracts are transparent and highly flexible — you only need to commit to hiring compute and other resources for a month and no longer than that.
Public cloud solutions are of great benefit to businesses — as we have shown in this article. If you are looking to become a lean innovator while also maintaining agility along with ample BCDR plans in place as also redundant data backups for ensuring peace of mind, chat with us, call us today (1-855-781-8934) or send us an email ([email protected]).
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