The Rise of Cloud Computing
This report discusses about the contexts and evolution of cloud computing which have been seen massive growth in the past few years. There is further identification of the key drivers for the implementation of cloud technologies by various multinational organisations and how it impacts positively or negatively on the business environment. Meanwhile, there is an assessment of cloud computing as a resource so to which presents an ideal solution for organisations encompassing their infrastructure or introducing innovative concepts. In relation to cloud computing, it is the use of networks of remote servers, basically accessed through the internet for the purpose of storage, management and processing of data. Considering the progressive rise in a digital and technological environment, cloud computing is making billions of dollars in revenue annually in contexts to its three service models known to be platform, software and infrastructure. In 2020, software as a service (SaaS) signified the major segment of the international cloud computing industry, with 165 billion U.S. dollars in returns (Mlitz, 2021).
The growth and trends in cloud computing change at a leap that can be enraging to follow and difficult to anticipate and several of those emerging cloud computing developments stanch from the industry inflowing a stage of standardisation and improved competency – a sign of maturity in whichever technological sector. In relation to certain illustrations of cloud computing, cloud services as AWS has been rented to Netflix by Amazon whereas web-based email services like Gmail and hot mail also use cloud computing services.
Cloud computing as a term has been nearly from the early 2000s, however, the conception of computing-as-a-service has been there for much long in the past i.e. 1960s when computer departments would enable organisations to rent time on a mainframe, irrespective to purchase one themselves. Furthermore, the ‘time-sharing’ services were essentially overhauled by the rise of the Personal Computer which made keeping a computer higher affordable, and then, later on, the increase of business data centres comes around where businesses would stock huge extents of data. However, the idea of leasing access to the influence of computing has re-emerged continuously in the application service providers, utility computing, and grid computing of the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was later on trailed by cloud computing, which essentially took clamp with the advent of software as a service and hyper scale cloud computing vendors like AWS.
In the current time, the cloud has become an allegory for modern computing itself, where everything is a service – which can link and combine with other services to come across an infinite number of application needs. The real potentials, though, arise from the big IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) clouds comprising AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Meanwhile, cloud migration proposes flexibility over on-site hardware in relation to resource ascending to link with user demand. Apart from an inexpensive upfront investment and no hardware expenditures, functioning via the cloud lets for greater consistent data security, better solidity, and constant updation. In relation to the current state of cloud computing, enabling resource provisioning in response to changes in workload requirements, cloud computing assists companies to configure flexible architecture to manage dynamic applications. It could help businesses in many ways including rapid product testing as well as delivery, elastic global scaling, the improved overall performance of the employee and developer productivity. According to Tabrizchi and Rafsanjani (2020), the key advantages of shifting the workloads to the cloud comprises of speed, cost optimization, scalability, improved application performance and reliability.
Key Drivers for Implementing Cloud Technologies
According to Jouini and Rabai (2016), as many stakeholders take part in cloud computing services, so did the focus on cloud enablers and their role in offering added capabilities to the cloud. This cloud based transformation is in its initial stages, and its definitive influence on stakeholders in relation of value creation is not yet acknowledged. The significant feature of this change is the transference of investment and impact in relation to design, structure, emecution and upkeep of IT infrastructure systems and the services backing up them, in the direction of the cloud value chain player called as the Cloud services provider. Its key impact can be further seen on regulators and legislators where at the time of adopting emerging technologies, there could be an allowance of regulations to direct safe and transparent approaches of data exchange. In terms of end-users, they are given the least emphasis as many of the researches depict cloud providers and cloud consumers as vital stakeholders in the value-chain. In the case of developers, it is now possible to develop, test, and deploy totally new solutions in days or weeks as of rapid ability to deploy solutions in contexts of cloud computing. Meanwhile, the transformative potential of cloud computing can be further seen in contexts of enhanced flexibility, strong security measures, real-time customer feedback and operational improvements.
Information is all most significant technology asset and the rising power and usage of computing, as well as the cloud, enables world-changing leaders, businesses and entrepreneurs to develop and scale their organisations faster than ever before and to mark substantial impact with the limited resources. Moreover, this was especially beneficial in the developing nations where the developers can be allowed them to deploy their software that lacked the technology infrastructure required to deliver work for employers positioned on the opposite side of the world. In relation to the business landscape, multi-cloud strategies are adopted by many businesses for the purpose of increasing agility, minimizing vendor lock-in, taking gain of best-in-breed solutions, improving cost efficiencies, and rise flexibility via choice. At the current time, 93% of companies have a multi-cloud tactic and approach with a means to competently accumulate and exploit their data from each points (forbes.com, 2020). With developing multi-cloud abilities, it is developed to provide greater flexibility and choice to run their programs in the utmost competent way.
The development of current technology has required the company to implant new technologies to turn out to be higher competitive. In an age where access to technology is becoming the most significant limiting factor, there are different factors in the adoption of cloud technologies due to its scalability and innovation’s whereas the continual system updates reinforce timescales due to the increasing speed of progress, the cloud and transforming from a nice-to-have solution for clients and businesses to an essential next step (Hsu and Lin, 2016).
There are many benefits for the business to migrate their platforms, infrastructure, or software to the cloud where the first is cost reduction. The companies can cut their operational expenses as their DevOps specialists and system administrators do not spend time on back-up and hardware maintenance. Taking an example of Emirates, the airline moved from on-premises to the cloud so that to decrease the cost of maintenance and respond to an increase in traffic. It makes the company to be expected a saving of $1 million after completely retiring its out-of-date hardware (amazon.com, 2020). Meanwhile, scalability is also one of the advantages where in case of high workload, the company can quickly respond to peak demands and lower capacity when it is essential whereas all it is done in an automatic way and thus, save much time and effort. Taking an example of Yedpay, the company when migrated to the cloud after experiencing a data centre problem and the company even reduced its costs by 40 percent (amazon.com, 2020a). It is also necessary for businesses to migrate their platforms to the cloud as to gain higher security in the digital environment. As per the research by Gartner’s, up to 99 percent of cloud security failures through 2025 will be the customer’s mistake (gartner.com, 2019). Cloud migration further helps in delivering reliability for reducing downtimes and lowering data loss risk in the future. Many of the leading vendors have service-level contracts that provide assurance for 99 percent uptime (Khan and Gouveia, 2018). Furthermore, vendors also bear accountability for backups and disaster recovery, which may save much time for the company team.
Assessing Cloud Computing as a Resource
In the present time, the cloud has demonstrated to be an end-to-end strategy that assists companies to originate insights from real-time data, improving decision-making and taking advantage of on new opportunities — all to disrupt and distinguish with accelerated innovation. The environment and culture around cloud software are fast changing and as per the report by McKinsey, 75 percent of cloud predicted values occurs from accelerating innovation, with the significance of cloud core projected at $770 billion in innovation-driven development in associated to $430 billion in cost and risk lessening (mckinsey.com, 2021). At first, the cloud present a pay-as-you-go model with the OpEx Model, which makes higher space for funds to be flowed into experiences and experimentation, which radically impact on the overall business development (Mustafa et al, 2019). Meanwhile, the PaaS (Platform as a service) capabilities of cloud help businesses to not spend much time on scalability, strengths, provisioning, disposition and automation sides while through appropriate control, it can streamline the application development lifecycle with presenting quicker time to marketplace. Most importantly, the cloud has democratized artificial intelligence and machine learning and it is no longer shortened to an ensiled group of experts and data researchers.
Cloud adoption continues to see significant growth though there are certain challenges and risks that need to be considered by businesses when migrating to the cloud and using different applications of cloud computing (Moura and Hutchison, 2016). Compatibility is the first challenge at the time of adopting cloud computing as cloud environments are becoming more open in order to upkeep different data types; though, there are still several restrictions for each cloud deployment in terms of what they were able to work with. There is being the further risk of lack of control as at the time when a business opted for services for cloud based provider, it can be challenging to identify like who in control of access to the data in a cloud service and What occurs a business will not able to accomplish payment. The next risk could be related to legal and compliances where several data security provisions aimed to safeguard a particular type of data. For instance, HIPAA (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) needs healthcare providers to guard patient information. PCI DSS needs anyone who accepts credit cards to protect cardholder information. Hence, if any of the companies do not have appropriate legal protections, then it may be liable at the time of data rupture at the cloud service that discloses the organisation data.
There are many cloud service providers that aim to deliver secure and reliable service to their clients and businesses though it is necessary to consider these vendors on the basis of various factors either it be their support in the cloud migration and their reach in the global marketplaces or the competitors’ offerings.
AWS and its extensive certified APN Partner community provide the company business with training, tools, security, and expertise at all stages and for every size of deployment. Strategic workloads driving on AWS encompass applications including SAP, vSphere-based workloads like VMware Horizon, SharePoint, and Citrix, and databases including Oracle, SQL Server and, SAP HANA. Additionally, operating systems from SUSE, Canonical, and Microsoft all operates on AWS to upkeep critical corporate processes. AWS further allow its customers to select various choices to update new or existing applications by running containerized workloads via Amazon ECS or Amazon EKS, or they can go serverless with AWS Lambda. Meanwhile, AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) delivers customers with consulting assistance, training, and services acclaim to decrease the threat of migration to the cloud (Sullivan, 2020). This program also assists consumers to develop a robust operational basis, and aid in offsetting the early cost of migrations.
The Revolutionary Trends Impacting the Cloud Computing Industry
As a provider of IaaS, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS EC2) simplifies much protected, cost-effective, flexible, and scalable cloud infrastructure and computing capability. As an IaaS enabler, it also drive it easier for cloud developers to auto-scale resources and creates web-scale cloud computing simpler. To make sure safe access to resources, AWS presents Identity and Access Management (IAM) that enables individuals to describe roles and groups, and offer individuality and access authorisations. For the purpose of SaaS, AWS offers its clients with complete solutions that are run and administered by AWS (hubspot.net, 2021). Meanwhile, AWS as a SaaS model embraces a multi-tenant strategy to make sure services are on a protected and separated space. Meanwhile, with services like Amazon CloudWatch, companies can end application and infrastructure management in real-time. In contexts to PaaS, AWS Lambda can be a beneficial server less computing service that lets the developers to drive their code in the standard runtime environment of Lambda and they do not need to concern for the server handling with zero supervision (hubspot.net, 2021).
There are many benefits and drawbacks of Amazon Web Services like AWS is easy to use where this server interface offers access to extensive number of applications and services. Moreover, AWS has an incredible range of tools while it was initially meant for cloud storage and computing, it is extended into more than seventy additional services (Palumbo et al, 2021). AWS also have a greater competitive advantage due to having unlimited capacity in the space. Moreover, businesses might consider AWS due to its tight security and capability that can help the companies to save their private information safe with this cloud provider. However, a business might decide to against using AWS if it not operating on a large scale. There are also limits in the Amazon EC2 where a second problem with this is making the restrictive of resources in consideration with the region (Palumbo et al, 2021). So, where if the business situated or its region can identify just how many resources it will have access to.
Microsoft Azure is present as one of the strongest alternatives to AWS widely used for building testing, deploying and managing applications. It is also one of the fastest growing clouds among all its competitors where it presents several services within different categories comprising AI, Blockchain, Developer Tools, Networking and its intelligence cloud makes it one of the most smart and striking with having the most advanced and greatest number of smart products and services (Dutta and Dutta, 2019). Azure also have a different set of applications and framework as per the requirements of dissimilar clients and customers. It also presents the top data centres internationally other than any service provider and this makes a foray to the client mind to hold over Microsoft Azure cloud for their business cloud integration and functionality. Big businesses capitalize heavily in cloud processing options and therefore, it is necessary to integrate the best cloud computing services.
References
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Tabrizchi, H. and Rafsanjani, M.K., 2020. A survey on security challenges in cloud computing: issues, threats, and solutions. The journal of supercomputin
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