Types of Cloud Computing, Benefits and Practices to avoid while moving to the Cloud

In IT industry , we often focus on the benefits that the cloud can bring to a business. Nowadays, everyone from startups and global enterprises uses various cloud computing types to obtain data and store all kinds of data and run their applications to generate revenues.

What is Cloud Computing?

“Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

It is an approach to hardware utilization where all the computing resources are owned by any of the cloud service provider are pooled together and made available to users on demand. Every customer can scale their cloud instances up and down with ease to meet their challenges while paying only for the resources that they have consumed.

Types of Cloud Computing

Three Service Models of Cloud Computing

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Software as a Service (SaaS): The ability to access the provider’s applications running in the cloud environment is referred SaaS. Devices such as smart phones, laptops, desktops, and tablets can be used to access the applications through a web browser or a program interface.

The cloud user however cannot access or manage the cloud infrastructure that hosts the applications. This includes the servers, storage devices, network and individual application components.

Platform as a Service (PaaS): PaaS refers to provisioning a developer’s platform who writes custom application using the hardware, operating system (OS), database and middleware.

However they have the ability to monitor and manage the applications that they have deployed and respective configuration settings for the application-hosting environment.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): The user is allowed to provision processing, storage, networks and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run operating systems and other applications.

Though the cloud user can establish complete control over operating systems, storage and deployed applications, the underlying cloud infrastructure remains unperturbed.

Types of Cloud Computing

Key benefits of cloud computing

1. Scalability — It is to scale your systems up and down on-demand and with ease and whenever needed.
2. High availability — instead of accessing a single server over the Internet, modern customers access your services via a variety of applications across a wide range of resources.
3. Shorter time-to-market — due to an ability to provide the required environments nearly instantly, the cloud empowers your IT team to greatly reduce the time needed for developing new product features or services, and shorter time-to-market means great competitiveness.
4. Better cost-efficiency — By using cloud infrastructure, you don’t have to spend huge amounts of money on purchasing and maintaing equipment. This drastically reduces capex costs. You don’t have to invest in hardware, facilities, utilities, or building out a large data center to grow your business. You do not even need large IT teams to handle your cloud data center operations, as you can enjoy the expertise of your cloud provider’s staff.
5. Security — One of the major concerns of every business, regardless of size and industry, is the security of its data. Data breaches and other cybercrimes can devastate a company’s revenue, customer loyalty and brand positioning. Cloud storage providers implement baseline protections for their platforms and the data they process, such authentication, access control, and encryption.

Key Benefits of cloud

Practices to Avoid While Moving to the Cloud

1)Jumping in too Soon= Moving to the cloud requires the due diligence of a number of factors such as security, regulatory measures, business needs, cost analysis and so on. Organizations should avoid jumping in too soon.

2)Lack of Contingency Plan= Moving to the cloud without a contingency plan is like setting oneself up for failure. Various risks associated with the cloud are to be evaluated. A recovery plan should be in place before migrating to the cloud.

3)Lack of Understanding the Business Needs= Its good to evaluate the actual needs of the business and then map it onto the solutions available in the market. Cloud customers must be able define the exact business case.

4)Wrong Choice of Cloud Service Provider

Questions below can be used as a checklist while selecting the right cloud vendor:

1. How will they support my business and its operations?
2. Are they available readily and easy to work with?
3. Will their pricing model suit the budget?
4. Can they give references?
5. Do they promise an uptime for their services?

5)Ignoring Legal and Compliance Issues=Cloud services subject organizations to legal and compliance issues and as the controller of data, organizations must handle these issues appropriately to avoid expensive legal penalties.

6)No due-diligence on Privacy and Data Security

Following is a list of security questions that must be asked to cloud vendor before giving the final nod:

1. Where does my data physically reside?

2. Do you hold any certification pertaining to data protection?

3. Will my data be encrypted? How do you plan to manage the encryption keys?

4. Who gets to access my data?

5. How does transition of data during the exit process work?

7)Ignoring the Service Level Agreements

A service level agreement is a significant legal tool that determines how well the cloud experience turns out to be from the end user perspective. It helps evaluate parameters such as cloud availability, quality of service, response time, capacity and so on.