We are in post-pandemic times but certain things are not going back to “normal”. Although we get used to spending long hours using technology, businesses and people are still having a hard time jumping into a fully cloud-based environment, and that’s ok. There are some risks to consider depending on the business industry, like privacy protocols, control of data, and so on. Being said so, some businesses could opt for hybrid cloud infrastructure to have the best of private and cloud computing platforms.
If you are reading until now, it means that you are willing to learn what should be the best approach for your company to “move to the cloud”, and what are the types of cloud computing platforms and their benefits.
But before addressing the advantages a business might experience by implementing cloud infrastructure, let’s quickly review what cloud computing is.
What is a Cloud Computing Platform?
A cloud computing platform refers to the usage of hardware and software delivered over a network (usually the Internet). So, instead of having to create, store, and maintain information and apps on your hard disk or servers, cloud computing allows you to access them online.
By using cloud computing, you are able to access your business data everywhere on any hardware with certain credentials.
Top 3 Benefits of Cloud Computing
There are many benefits of using cloud computing. However, here I address the three that I consider the most important ones:
1. Cost Savings
You don’t have to invest a huge amount of money and time buying assets like hardware, facilities, utilities, and a big IT team for a large IT infrastructure to maintain the cloud data center operations.
The hired cloud service company will provide skilled staff to learn how it works and solve potential issues on the system.
2. Allows companies to scale
When a business is changing and growing, IT needs and requirements will also be evolving. To avoid last-minute investment, having cloud-based software will allow you to increase cloud capacity quickly and efficiently.
Besides, scalability will reduce make risky decisions and increase the resources available in real-time.
3. Keep your data secure
Data is one of the most valuable assets for any company. No matter if your business is a startup or an enterprise, many hackers are trying to break the doors of your data storage and damage your customers’ loyalty. Cloud integration will significantly reduce the risk to receive a cyberattack.
High-security technology will be available for your company to be applied to any environment. Also, your cloud service providers adopt fundamental security measures for their systems and the data they protect, including encryption, password protection, and authentication.
Types of Cloud Computing Platforms
So, the golden question that you might have is: Which cloud computing platform will offer me the best resources? Well, it depends on the level of protection and management that your company requires. To help you with that, I’ll address the 3 types of cloud computing platforms and their benefits:
Public Cloud Computing
As the name suggests, public cloud computing has a complete computing infrastructure that is housed on the cloud provider’s property to make their services available online to the public. Therefore, businesses can easily add more users or processing power as needed and do not need to operate their own IT. For example, Qualtrics uses AWS as a public cloud computing platform.
The public cloud also means that many tenants share the IT infrastructure of the cloud provider.
Private Cloud Computing
Unlike public cloud computing, a private cloud will only be used by your company, which makes this option more secure than the first mentioned. The downside is that having a private cloud will be more expensive because of its exclusivity.
Hybrid Cloud Computing
Hybrid cloud computing platforms are essentially combinations of the functionalities on the abovementioned platforms. Both private and public cloud characteristics can be found in hybrid clouds. For businesses that want to deploy reliable security and affordable solutions, hybrid clouds might be practical.
Besides that, hybrid cloud integrations can be a solution that establishes a framework from a system integration across SaaS apps, data from databases or other systems, B2B solutions, and workflows giving flexibility to your infrastructure.
How do you Combine the Cloud Computing Platforms?
Hybrid Cloud Integration
With the hybrid integration, you can connect your company’s on-premises systems, applications, and cloud-based services together as one coherent system. In their corporate architecture, the majority of current businesses have already deployed a hybrid cloud integration or are considering using this infrastructure.
If you are not sure about migrating all of your data into a cloud computing platform and prefer to have some inside on-premises systems, your best strategy should be a hybrid cloud integration. It will help you connect application within both environments and synchronize the data for a better decision making and information analysis.
Conclusion
There are more and more companies choosing cloud computing platforms and it won’t stop because the list of benefits is huge as its impact on revenue, flexible collaboration space, and security.
Here at elastic.io, we offer different solutions for business, whether looking for enterprise integration with all of the mentioned cloud computing platforms, if your company is evolving and needs a 100% data cloud migration, or if you rather choose to have the flexibility of having access to the cloud while keeping certain data in a local environment.
