In the simplest words Cloud computing means that instead of all the computer software and hardware you’re employing and using sitting on your desktop, or somewhere inside your company’s network, it’s provided for you as a service by another company (also known as a Cloud Service Provider) and accessed over the Internet. Cloud Computing provides services like Databases, Storage, networking, Servers, software’s etc. through the Internet. Cloud computing has enabled organizations to not only lower administrative and overhead costs but also abound in business innovation and growth. While cloud computing empowers organizations to reduce their legacy infrastructure costs, it also functions as a catalyst for emerging technologies like analytics, mobility, and big data.
The cloud is universally believed to represent the future model for the delivery of IT services. When small to medium business switch with cloud computing, it increases their productivity by 40%. Cloud Computing is transforming technology and data center infrastructure and greatly enables your organisation to perform better and deliver better productivity.
A public cloud is a cloud computing model in which a service provider makes resources (such as virtual machines, applications or storage) available to the users remotely over the internet. Public cloud services are considered as the standard cloud computing model and may be free or offered on a pay-per-usage/ Pay-as-you-go model. Public cloud includes a whole host of services and companies and the pay-per-usage pricing structure offered by most public cloud providers is also considered by most enterprises as an attractive and more flexible financial model.
Public Cloud Service Providers:
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce, SAP, IBM Cloud, Oracle.
Private clouds are data center architectures which are owned by a single company that provides flexibility, scalability, provisioning, automation and monitoring. The goal of a private cloud is to gain the benefits of cloud architecture without compromising on the control of maintaining your own data center. It is not to sell “as-a-service” offerings to external customers. It is much simpler to move from your on-premises environment to a private cloud than from on-premises to public cloud. There are many advantages of using the public cloud; however, businesses very rarely set up 100% of their programs into the public cloud. Private clouds, including Virtual Private Clouds, are generally preferred by mid and large size enterprises because they meet their security and compliance requirements; however, even small-businesses that handle critical and confidential can reap its benefits.
Benefits:
Private Cloud Providers:
IBM Private Cloud (Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry), HP Enterprise, Dell EMC, Oracle Private Cloud, Cisco, VMware, Red Hat.
Hybrid cloud enables an enterprise to use a broader mix of IT services by allowing workloads to be allocated between private and public clouds as computing needs and costs change, thus giving businesses greater flexibility and more data deployment options.
Hybrid cloud computing enables businesses to host sensitive or critical workloads by deploying an on-premises private cloud and use a third-party public cloud provider to host less-critical resources, such as test and development workloads
Certain prerequisites are needed to be met before the hybrid cloud can be deployed:
Hybrid Cloud service provider:
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cisco-Google Cloud Platform, HP Enterprise, VMWare, Dell EMC Hybrid, Red Hat (Openshift, Cloud Suite), Oracle, IBM Z hybrid, SAP HANA, Citrix hybrid cloud
This is the future of the cloud. According to one survey as of today, more than 1/4th companies use more than four cloud vendors for their workloads.
It is a model used by companies for cost optimization, avoiding vendor lock-in, data sovereignty, minimizing downtime through an active-passive solution on different vendors, and to leverage their expertise in different workloads/services. In this model, a company uses different public cloud vendors for different projects. Like they may opt AWS for IaaS, GCP for analytics, AZURE for AD or security solutions. So they are not dependent on a single vendor. With this trend, even top vendors like GCP & AWS have created APIs to interact with each other. This move is a step towards greater cloud collaboration.
Often, multi-cloud can be confused with the hybrid cloud. It is different from a hybrid cloud since a hybrid cloud is an infrastructure, while multi-cloud is a strategy. Enterprises choose to deploy a multi-cloud strategy due to the benefits:
Continous availability: For some reason, even if one cloud goes offline, the business can continue using other cloud solutions.
Flexibility: A business can select cloud options based on their business needs, economics, locations, and timing.
Avoid Lock-in: A business can escape vendor lock-in as its data is stored on various service providers’ clouds.
IaaS or Infrastructure-as-a-service is the basic layer in the cloud computing model. IaaS, as the name suggests, provides the infrastructure such as virtual machines, virtual-machine disk image library, block and file-based storage, firewalls, load balancers, virtual local area networks, IP addresses etc. You get the infrastructure and pay accordingly.
Examples: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cisco Metapod, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine (GCE), DigitalOcean, Linode, Rackspace
PaaS or Platform as a service is a layer on top of IaaS as the next thing you require or demand after infrastructure is a platform. This cloud computing service model provides you computing platforms which typically includes an operating system, programming language execution environment, database, web server.
Examples: AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Windows Azure, Google App Engine, Heroku, Force.com, Apache Stratos.
SaaS or Software-as-a-Service provides you access to application services for use, that are installed at a server. It eliminates the need for the installation, maintenance or coding of that software that is being used. All you would require is a browser to access and operate the software without the need to download or install any kind of setup or OS. All software related maintenance, setup or help is provided by SaaS Provider, and you will only have to pay for your usage.
Examples: Microsoft office365, Google Apps, Gmail, Google docs, WHMCS billing software
As a cloud services provider, we can help you maximize business value from your IT investments and create responsive and performance-driven IT environment. AceTek’s expert consultants can help you gain cloud technology benefits and reach your business goals. Given below are some benefits your organisation can derive by using our services
Reduce Cost and Control Expenses
Cloud solutions reduce or eliminate capital expenses for hardware and software systems and upgrades. They also reduce or eliminate monthly operating expenses for facilities, labor and system maintenance.
Increased Productivity
Employee productivity is improved by the enhanced mobility offered by the cloud and the enablement of workgroup collaboration from any location and at any time of day or night.
Improved Business Efficiency
Business efficiency is improved by new, hosted applications that automate workflows and business processes and eliminate downtime.
Reduce Business Risk
Hosted services can drastically reduce the risk of a security breach to data privacy or an attack on systems and services in a secure, SAS 70 compliant and redundant data center.
Enable Growth
The cloud can enable faster growth for companies who leverage advanced technologies like smartphones, tablets, and netbooks to operate on‐demand cloud‐based applications and services to gain a competitive edge in the marketplace.
Every cloud project is unique, and we work with our clients to design and implement custom based Cloud solutions that span the robust features various Cloud Platforms offer. Whether you are looking to move to a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solution for hosting core services like email, an IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) solution for moving servers out of your Datacenter, a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution for deploying your applications, or all of the above, we can help. We work with you to define the right cloud solution for your business needs and requirements with a holistic approach that addresses people, processes as well as technology.
