How is cloud computing being used by enterprises today? What are the most common applications?

CloudStrategy & Architecture
2.1k views8 Comments
Solutions Architect in Software, 501 - 1,000 employees
Just like the old-school onprem solutions: servers/services, DBs, Storages, etc. In terms of application nothing really changed.

The big difference is that instead of maintaining the whole infrastructure and keeping the DevOps team, big part of development, maintenence, security, scalability and other factors are delecated to the service provider, reducing costs and time to market
Sr. Director of Engineering in Software, 51 - 200 employees
The cloud infra (including computing) is being used by enterprises in many ways currently - compute, storage, networking, containerisation etc. to cater to ever increasing needs to availability, scalability and resiliency. The cloud based applications ensure easy availability and scalability with different kinds of data stores. Enterprises are also using cloud for serving their data storage and analytical needs. The different kind of data - time series, transactional, historical data etc is being stored in different data store offerings and is being made available for different audiences including business analysts. 
Earlier CIO in Manufacturing, Self-employed
Moving to the cloud is done on following considerations:
a.  Organisation operates in rented premises.  Do not have the required infrastructure to build a proper Tier 4 data center
b.  Disaster Recovery systems is kept in cloud as it would be rarely used
c.   Unable to recruit and maintain people for managing the server infrastructure and security.  So host servers on the cloud
d.  Test & development systems which need to be made available quickly.
e.   Load on systems is unpredictable.  Need to scale up and scale down very quickly due to varying demand
 f.  Requirement is only temporary in nature
Co-founder & CTO in Finance (non-banking), 51 - 200 employees
Cloud computing is the de-facto choice for organizations of all shapes and sizes today. Consider it very similar to the old-school data center, but you do not have to manage the physical infrastructure and can move across & scale into any geography without having to worry about the integrities of physical setups. The cloud provider will do it for you. Also, since the overall infrastructure is shared, you end up paying less and get more performance and flexibility in many, if not all cases.

Chair and Professor, Startup CTO in Education, 5,001 - 10,000 employees
In educational institutions, almost all data (email, documents, etc.) are online and in the cloud. Faculty and students are also using cloud computing to conduct research in computational modeling. 
VP of Engineering in Software, 11 - 50 employees
We use the cloud to avoid internal on-premises IT in order to reduce the overall costs, increase security, and ease the work supported by IT (no hardware to invest in and maintain). All the applications we traditionnaly had internally are now in the cloud.
Senior Director of DevSecOps in Hardware, 1,001 - 5,000 employees
Agreed with what has been said so far, cloud computing basically shifts the location of on prem solutions and helps to lower costs as long as you identify the right solutions for your needs.  There isn't a one size fits all plan for moving to the cloud and you have to identify scalability, maintainability, security, availability concerns to name a few to determine the best solution that will support what you and your teams need to accomplish while reducing overall costs.
Vice President Global Head of Value Engineering in Software, 1,001 - 5,000 employees
Cloud can act as a catalyst to reduce TCO within your IT environment. The burden of managing your hardware estate, upgrade cycles, support & maintenance work, customisations etc can all now be shifted onto the vendor to manage and optimise, freeing up your IT org time towards forward looking and value adding tasks. Cloud also acts as a key efficiency enabler via process automation, easier configurability and empowered self-service capability for your users and leaders alike. Most common applications have included IaaS, CRM, HCM, Collaboration with more applications making the shift including Financials, Planning & Analytics, Middle Office and Supply Chain.
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