According to the most recent Gartner, Inc. forecast, global end-user spending on public cloud services will increase 20.7% to $591.8 billion in 2023, up from $490.3 billion in 2022. This is greater than the 18.8% growth predicted for 2022.
Previously, businesses had to store all of their data and software on their own hard drives and servers. The larger the company, the more storage it required. This method of handling data is not scalable in terms of speed. For example, if word got out about your company and you suddenly had a flood of online orders, your servers would most likely crash. For the IT department, good business meant a lot of work.
Cloud computing benefits more than just businesses. The cloud has also changed our lives as individuals. Many of us use cloud services on a daily basis. When we update our social media status, binge a new streaming series, or check our bank accounts, we are most likely using cloud-hosted applications. These apps are accessed via the internet rather than being installed on our hard drives or devices.
Cloud technology allows businesses to scale and adapt at a rapid pace, accelerating innovation, driving business agility, streamlining operations, and lowering costs. This can not only help companies get through the current crisis, but it can also lead to increased, long-term growth
Define Cloud computing
Here are multiple definitions put together feel free to stick to the one you like.
First Definition
The delivery of computing services via the internet is known as cloud computing. Common IT infrastructures such as virtual machines, storage, databases, and networking are examples of computing services. Cloud services also broaden traditional IT offerings to include the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) (AI).
Second Definition
"The cloud" is a well-worn metaphor for the Internet, but when combined with "computing," the meaning expands and becomes murkier. Some analysts and vendors define cloud computing as a more refined version of utility computing: essentially, virtual servers accessible via the Internet. Others argue that anything consumed outside the firewall is "in the cloud," including traditional outsourcing.
Third Definition
The collection of resources and services that will be shared among users via the web. Cloud computing is also known as web computing.
Benefits of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing represents a significant departure from the traditional way businesses think about IT resources. Here are seven of the most common reasons why businesses are turning to cloud computing services.
Cost
Cloud computing eliminates the capital expense of purchasing hardware and software as well as establishing and operating on-site data centers—the racks of servers, the round-the-clock electricity for power and cooling, and IT experts to manage the infrastructure. It quickly adds up.
Speed
Because most cloud computing services are self-service and on-demand, even massive amounts of computing resources can be provisioned in minutes, typically with just a few mouse clicks, giving businesses a lot of flexibility and relieving capacity planning pressure.
Global scale
The ability of scalability is one of the advantages of cloud computing services. That means delivering the right amount of IT resources—for example, more or less computing power, storage, and bandwidth—at the right time and from the right geographical location.
Productivity
On-site data centres typically necessitate a significant amount of "racking and stacking"—hardware installation, software patching, and other time-consuming IT management tasks. Cloud computing eliminates the need for many of these tasks, allowing IT teams to focus their efforts on more important business objectives.
Performance
The largest cloud computing services are delivered through a global network of secure data centres that are regularly upgraded to the most recent generation of fast and efficient computing hardware. This has several advantages over a single corporate data centre, including lower network latency for applications and larger economies of scale.
Reliability
Because data can be mirrored at multiple redundant sites on the cloud provider's network, cloud computing makes data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity easier and less expensive.
Security
Many cloud providers provide a comprehensive set of policies, technologies, and controls to help strengthen your overall security posture and protect your data, apps, and infrastructure from potential threats.
Challenges of Cloud Computing.
Even though cloud computing comes with numerous benefits, one must also take into consideration the challenges that come along with it. Here are some of the challenges.
Security
It is clear that the security issue has been the most significant impediment to Cloud computing. Without a doubt, putting your data on someone else's hard disc and running your software on someone else's CPU appears daunting to many. Data loss, phishing, and botnets (which run remotely on a collection of machines) are all well-known security issues that pose serious threats to an organization's data and software. Furthermore, the multi-tenancy model and pooled computing resources in cloud computing have introduced new security challenges that necessitate the use of novel techniques to address them. For example, hackers intend to use the Cloud to organise a botnet because the Cloud frequently provides more reliable infrastructure services at a lower cost for them to launch an attack.
Charging Model
From the perspective of a cloud provider, the elastic resource pool (via virtualization or multi-tenancy) has made cost analysis much more complicated than in traditional data centres, which frequently calculate their costs based on static computing consumption. Furthermore, rather than the underlying physical server, an instantiated virtual machine has become the unit of cost analysis. All of the above, as well as VM-related items such as software licences, virtual network usage, node and hypervisor management overhead, and so on, must be included in a sound charging model.
Costing Model
Cloud users must weigh the costs and benefits of computation, communication, and integration. While moving to the Cloud can significantly reduce infrastructure costs, it does increase the cost of data communication, i.e. the cost of transferring an organization's data to and from the public and community Cloud and the cost per unit (e.g. a VM) of computing resource used is likely to be higher. This issue is exacerbated if the consumer employs a hybrid cloud deployment model in which the organization's data is distributed across a number of public/private (in-house IT infrastructure)/community clouds. Putting the computation near the data still holds true in cloud computing. On-demand computing appears to make sense only for CPU-intensive tasks.
Service Level Agreements
Although cloud consumers have no control over the underlying computing resources, they must ensure the quality, availability, reliability, and performance of these resources after migrating their core business functions to their trusted cloud. In other words, consumers must obtain service delivery guarantees from providers. These are typically provided through Service Level Agreements (SLAs) negotiated between providers and customers. The very first issue is defining SLA specifications with an appropriate level of granularity, namely the tradeoffs between expressiveness and complicatedness so that they can cover the majority of consumer expectations while remaining relatively simple to be weighted, verified, evaluated, and enforced by the cloud resource allocation mechanism. Furthermore, different cloud offerings (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and DaaS) will require distinct SLA metal specifications.
Conclusion
Overall, we have discussed why we need cloud computing and what is it, its benefits and its challenges. Which helps us gain a better understanding of cloud computing. In upcoming blog posts, we will also be discussing what are the type of clouds, what are the types of services the cloud has to offer and the shared responsibility model.