Why Are So Many People Crazy About Cloud Technologies?
If you have even a bit of experience in IT, you definitely heard about clouds at least once. Time is passing, and technologies are developing, so more people, apart from IT, are learning about clouds. But there is still enough lack of understanding.
Speaking about clouds, some people mean cloud storage — not even S3-compatible storage, a kind of cloud service, but Dropbox or Google Drive. Another widely spread misconception is equating the cloud with VDS, which is fundamentally wrong.
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OK, let’s start with the definition
This cloud is a pool of hardware and software resources (servers, network equipment, storage, etc.) configured by the infrastructure provider through specific software, a hypervisor, and integrated into a unified infrastructure that is accessed for users via the Internet.
So, the provider has created a large and powerful cloud. Customers turn to the provider with specific requests. Some of them. e.g., needs an extensive and high-performance infrastructure for sophisticated computing tasks.
Other ones need solutions to arrange a remote office for 20 working employees. So, the provider gives all customers “pieces” of this cloud according to their needs.
It is essential to understand that simultaneously, the customers within the cloud infrastructure are not interconnected and do not know about each other. Thus, they do not interact with each other. Everyone uses exclusively the resources allocated to him.
But why is this needed?
Firstly, the cloud is convenient. Renting cloud resources, you shouldn’t care about the equipment to purchase for your business, and how to connect it. You do not need to think about the compatibility of hardware and software integration.
You are free to don’t care about maintaining and updating your servers and network configurations. You just use all of it. Yes, it’s effortless!
You just turn to the cloud provider with a request for the IAAS cloud service, and the provider allocates the necessary configuration of resources meeting your requirements — well, you got your cloud to use for your projects or business!
Secondly, the rent of the cloud is cost-effective. You do not need to spend money on the purchase of expensive high-end equipment, on the update, and maintain it. The provider does all this. At first glance, the monthly fee may seem significant.
But esteem the costs for the long term, you can see that renting a cloud is much cheaper than using on-premises servers in the office. And, sure, the cloud is flexible. Business grows and raises, and one day you will shockingly discover that your on-premises server has a lack of resources, the regular operations are impossible.
But in the cloud, all this trouble is shot quickly, since among the main advantages of clouds are flexibility and scalability. In other words, when you need to expand the infrastructure, you simply submit a request to the provider for an increase in resources and continue to work.
Definitely, the cloud has many other advantages besides those described above. They are, e.g., fault tolerance, accessibility via the Internet from anywhere in the world, physical and legal protection of equipment in the data center, and advanced data security.
Keeping information safe in the digital age is becoming increasingly difficult. Business owners have learned that professional cloud disaster recovery services provide an extra layer of security to make sure that your data is intact and safe in case of any unexpected disaster. This means that you don’t have to worry about data loss, as cloud services provide an extra layer of protection and backup.
But to fully enjoy all the advantages of using the cloud, previously, you should choose the right cloud provider. If a price is the heading criteria, you can run into an unscrupulous provider, and this kind of cooperation can generate a lot of inconveniences and even troubles.
For example, low-cost providers can have incompetent technical support or the support is inaccessible at all. Or you can get inconsistent configuration or resource capacities instead of ones you’ve expected. All these points make up the general impression of the provider and form the basis for cooperation. You can read more about the customer-focused and truly reliable infrastructure provider in the article.
