Benefits of Cloud Computing

• Not an all-or-nothing service
  • You can gradually move to cloud, called also lift and shift
• You’re able to spend more time on what matters and less time managing the underlying details.

Cost effective

• Provides pay-as-you-go or consumption-based pricing model.
  • No upfront infrastructure costs
  • No need to purchase and manage costly infrastructure/hardware that you may not use to its fullest
  • The ability to pay for additional resources only when they are needed
  • The ability to stop paying for resources that are no longer needed
• Enables better cost predictions using pricing of individual resources/services.
  • You can analyze future growth using historical data.

Scalable

• Increase or decrease the resources and services used based on the demand or workload at any given time
• Cloud computing supports both:
  • Horizontal scaling
    • Scaling “out”
    • Adding more servers that function together as one unit
  • Vertical scaling
    • Scaling “up”
    • Adding resources to increase the power of an existing server
      • e.g.Add more CPUs, or add more memory
• Scaling can be done manually or automatically based on e.g.
  • specific triggers such as CPU utilization

Elastic

• Cloud computing system can automatically add & remove resources to meet the current demand.
• E.g.
  • Add resources for the peak operating hours during which most people access the application
    • Only pay for increased resources during those hours
  • Remove the resources when the traffic normalizes
    • Do not pay anymore

Current

• Eliminates the burdens of maintaining software patches, hardware setup, upgrades, and other IT management tasks
  • automatically done
• The computer hardware is maintained and upgraded by the cloud provider
  • e.g. if a disk fails it’ll be replaced by the cloud provider

Reliable

• Cloud provider offers data backup, disaster recovery, and data replication services
• Redundancy is often built into cloud services architecture
  • so if one component fails, a backup component takes its place
  • this is referred to as fault tolerance and it ensures that your customers aren’t impacted when a disaster occurs.

Global

• Fully redundant datacenters located in various regions all over the globe.
• Enables local presence close to your customers to give them the best response time
• Replicate your services into multiple regions for redundancy and locality
• Select a specific region to ensure you meet data-residency and compliance laws for your customers.

Secure

• You have:
  • Physical security
    • Who can access the building, who can operate the server racks, and so on
    • Walls, cameras, gates, security personnel, employees have access only to those resources that they’ve been authorized to manage.
  • Digital security
    • Who can connect to your systems and data over the network.
    • E.g. only authorized users to be able to log into virtual machines or storage systems running in the cloud
    • Have tools to mitigate security threats that you can use.
• Broad set of policies, technologies, controls, and expert technical skills
  • can provide better security than most organizations can otherwise achieve