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