Marc Benioff rightly stated, ”The cloud is a democracy,” and we couldn’t agree more as the cloud services are for every individual and every organization size.
Cloud adoption has increased exponentially over the years, but post-pandemic, remote working kicked in more demand for cloud computing services. In the current and post-pandemic situation, the world is reshaping so are the business operations and their execution. A good deal of organizations is migrating their workloads to the cloud. Gartner backs it up with its recent article stating, ” Worldwide Public Cloud End-User Spending to Reach Nearly $600 Billion in 2023.”
The market size and user utilization prove that the adoption of cloud services has been a major shift in the history of business computing. However, like the cloud services individually are unique and serve a specific purpose, the size of businesses and their requirements are also different.
Owing to this, it becomes imperative to understand what the umbrella of the public cloud brings to the table. This article focuses on details of the public cloud to help you understand this evolving and amazing technology a little better.
The Outlining of Public Cloud
Basically, the public cloud is framed to be a set of computing services delivered by a third-party provider over the internet and accessible to people looking forward to utilizing or purchasing it. At times the benefits could be free or charged as per the usage for the used bandwidth, CPU cycles, and storage.
In contradiction to private cloud, public cloud saves businesses from spending extra on purchasing and managing on-premise applications and hardware infra. Plus, the cloud service provider is responsible for handling the entire infrastructure’s management, update, and maintenance.
Further public cloud can be deployed quicker than the physical infrastructure with an add-on of a nearly indefinite scalable platform. The employees of an organization can use a particular application from any office or branch with the public cloud as long as they are able to access the internet.
Though there have been security concerns about the public cloud, if implemented rightly, it is as secure as any other private cloud infra. This is achieved when the provider uses security methods like Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems or IDPs. But what cumulates to form a public cloud infra? Let’s have a look.
Framing of Public Cloud Architecture
A public cloud environment is entirely virtual and needs high bandwidth network connectivity for transferring and receiving data. The public cloud service providers have a multi-user architecture through which the different users run their workloads on shared infra and utilize the same computing services. Every user’s data is logically segregated and is kept isolated from that of other users’ data.
The cloud services are operated from remote locations under the public cloud region, which are termed availability zones. These zones have two or more densely available and connected data centers. Service models are the main pillars depending on which the public cloud architecture can further be classified.
The three most common service models of the public cloud are:
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service: In IaaS, the service provider is responsible for hosting the infra components like the storage, servers, and virtualization layer. The IaaS providers deliver virtual computing resources, like VMs with dedicated connections over the internet.
- Platform-as-a-Service: The users of PaaS are provided with the software and hardware tools, along with operating systems, by the providers, especially for application development.
- Software-as-a-Service: SaaS providers make the hosted applications available to users over the internet.
The Primacies of Public Cloud
Get your hands on new technologies
Organizations associated with huge service providers often get hands-on the latest industry-leading IT technologies which could be automatic updates for applications, AI, and Machine Learning. A lot of cloud customers cannot access these resources on their own.
Almost infinite virtual scalability
The resources and capacity available in the cloud can be expanded easily to meet the user demands while the traffic spikes. In addition, the logically chosen locations for the public cloud give its users better redundancy and availability. Also, apart from redundancy and availability, public cloud users are provided with enhanced connectivity to their end-users through the network interfaces of the service provider. But the issues of latency and bandwidth do prevail.
Say yes to flexibility
The scalability and flexibility brought in by the public cloud offer its users better storage and access to huge volumes of data. More often than not, organizations use the public cloud for disaster recovery and backing up their applications and data in case of an outage or emergency. Though it might seem tempting to have your data stored indefinitely, it is always better to have a data retention policy. This helps in deleting old data from the storage, saving you from long-term extra storage costs and maintenance.
Handling the analytics
The businesses should set up assisting metrics on the resources and data they utilize, leading to another advantage of cloud data analytics. In the public cloud, it is possible to do analytics for huge volumes of data and include various types of data for better business insights.
Public Cloud vs. Private Cloud vs. Hybrid Cloud
Cloud is versatile enough to meet the needs of different enterprises with different resource levels, adhere to various regulatory regimes, and meet various compliance requirements. In a scenario where an organization wants complete control over the cloud infrastructure and needs to keep data in-house for safety reasons behind its own firewall or to meet regulatory requirements, a private cloud may be the right option. Nevertheless, the public cloud provides an abundance of security options as well, including anti-malware protection, DDoS protection, ransomware protection, cloud firewall, and more.
A private cloud is an expensive option as it will be created entirely on-premises, and the customer/owner of the private cloud will not only be paying for the cost of the server/RAM/storage hardware but also for their upkeep, upgradation and maintenance. Offerings such as virtual private clouds and managed private clouds are making private clouds somewhat less complicated to set up and manage since third-party vendors step in and deploy, configure and manage the cloud on behalf of the customer.
However, if you want nearly unlimited compute/memory/storage at your disposal without making any massive upfront investments, then the public cloud should clearly be your go-to solution. Similarly, suppose you are looking for a scalable and elastic service. In that case, public clouds will also take care of unexpected surges in traffic, and you’ll be able to add capacity almost instantaneously. The public cloud takes a big load off you with its OPEX model versus on-premises set-ups, which would require huge CAPEX.
A hybrid cloud combines both a public cloud and a private cloud. Essentially, you shift some of your workloads to a public cloud and keep some workloads in a private cloud. The rationale for such an arrangement might have to do with data security or regulatory requirements. You might like to keep critical and confidential customer data in a private cloud, which is a completely dedicated service your organization owns or has rented from a private cloud service provider.
The public cloud can take care of a portion of your organization’s workload — say, email services or development or testing environments.
Why are Businesses Inclining Towards Public Cloud?
Organizations face multiple challenges while expanding their business operations, and the public cloud seems to handle all of those well. Let’s have a look at a few of the challenges and how the public cloud is tackling them.
- Cost Saving: Prior to the amazement of cloud services, companies had to pay for on-site servers and data centers. The public cloud offers the ability to save costs by paying a hosting provider for resources rather than hosting them in-house. For instance, one can save 30%-50% on costs by utilizing Ace Public Cloud services.
- Data Security: In comparison to other hosting services, data on the public cloud is well encrypted. Since public cloud technologies are updated consistently and have new data centers, the ability to fight the latest cyber security threats is better in cloud services than in off-site servers. Also, organizations do not have to worry about the in-house safety of resources as the provider offers multiple options for security, like VPNs, tokenization, and firewalls.
- Data Insights: The required business insights and analytics can be at your fingertips within seconds with public cloud services. And more than quickly accessing the insights, the collaborations, sharing, and assessments of these insights with the employees can be carried out efficiently. Many cloud services companies offer additional tools and functionality for analytics depending on the business needs. The four important analytics tools include diagnostic, predictive, descriptive, and prescriptive analysis.
- Data Recovery: Organizations do not have to worry about losing their crucial data even in a time of emergency with cloud technology. The data can be accessed from anywhere. The public cloud comes with fail-safes like putting your data on a secondary platform in case of an outage or emergency to enable business continuity.
- Scalability: Most public cloud companies offer a pay-as-you-go pricing model allowing you to scale your utilization of resources per the company’s growth. With this aspect, you can easily scale up or down the resources according to the business adaptation. For instance, if you have a startup, you would not require data analytic tools or CRM right away; with the growth of your company, you would need better CRM tools and data insights. Incorporating an all-in-one CRM can further streamline your business processes as you expand, providing comprehensive customer relationship management capabilities in a single platform.
- Collaboration: Public cloud is best known for bringing the team together to work simultaneously on the same platform and space while delivering automatic sync and storage updates. You can say no to sharing different versions of the same document, as the cloud will always present the updated version.
- Environmental Concerns: While the need for power to back up the on-site servers and data centers gets eliminated with the public cloud; you also save the environment from getting directly impacted. In addition, you will only be utilizing the resources you need. Hence, the consumption of power will be limited to your operations only.
- Time Savings: Time savings comes in multiple ways with the public cloud. Implementation of public cloud technology offers quicker training and updates than traditional software. Many cloud companies open doors to in-house training, and communication and collaboration while working from home become efficient too.
Big Names That Transitioned to Cloud
In current scenarios, many businesses cannot function with the cloud. And some of them leverage every day benefits from cloud technologies. Let’s look at some case studies that prove so.
Netflix
One of the early adopters of cloud technology was Netflix, and that too way before people understood what it was. In the course of the pandemic, Netflix pushed its cloud technology limits to new heights. It brought in the fourth season of its massively popular show ‘The Crown’ using AWS cloud technology, and that too for the VFX work done after the production. Further, in 2021, the expansion of Netflix’s visual studio happened, which made its animation and effect artists work and collaborate seamlessly using AWS.
Before the pandemic, the popular social media platform network migrated to Google Cloud, a six-month-long process to provide Twitter with better functionality and flexibility. By March 2020, the developers of Twitter produced new features. Post switching to Google Cloud, Twitter has witnessed improvements in its real-time data pipeline.
National Basketball Association (NBA)
NBA developed CourtOptix using Microsoft Azure to bring artificial intelligence insights closer to both fans and workers. NBA used its Twitter platform to announce this fresh analysis system currently utilized for better insights for game broadcastings. With the usage of both Microsoft Azure and AI, NBA can find interesting insights into the huge volumes of data already existing.
Cloud Encryption
Cloud Encryption is a process of transforming the data into an unreadable format from its original text format, like a ciphertext, before transferring to and storing it in the cloud. Like any other data encryption format, cloud encryption also makes the information impossible to decipher without the encryption keys. This applies in case of data theft, loss of data, or sharing it with an unauthorized person.
The key component of an organization’s cybersecurity strategy is encryption. Furthermore, than protecting the data misuse, encryption also tackles other safety concerns like:
- Regulatory and compliance standards in terms of data protection and privacy
- More protection against unauthorized data access by other public cloud users
- Taking care of an organization’s need to disclose security events and data breaches
In a nutshell
Cloud has helped the digitalization of organizations in numerous ways, enabling collaboration and remote work and empowering employees to achieve more.
Ace Cloud Hosting’s public cloud is secure, scalable, flexible, and globally available. Whether you are driven by the financial benefits of moving from a CAPEX to an OPEX model or you are looking for agility in developing and delivering new or enhanced IT products or services, investing in the public cloud is virtually a sine qua non.
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