What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud can be defined in many ways. The easiest way for me to describe it is to use the example of travelling on a public bus versus owning a car.

Let’s say you own a car, which is pretty exciting, but it comes with a lot of setbacks. You have to pay for maintenance and repair, as well as parking. You also have to make sure you pay for insurance in the case of an accident. You do have the liberty to use it as much as you want just as long as you are keeping the fuel tank filled. All this adds up to a lot of expense. On the other hand, if you use a bus, all you have to do is pay the fare when you use it. You don’t have to worry about maintenance costs, insurance or parking. It is all covered by the bus companies.

Cloud computing is similar to using a public bus. You only pay for what you use and when you use it. You don’t have to worry about maintenance or upgrades as it is taken care of by the cloud hosting company. Also, there are dedicated resources that make sure it is secure and no one is trying to break in.

Cloud allows you to scale as per your need. For example, we see a high trend in online shopping during Christmas time, which means a lot of traffic on your website. In a typical on-premise environment, one would have to plan months in advance to make sure they have purchased or setup the right hardware to meet the demands. In the cloud world one can simply spin up new servers in minutes or utilize load balancers that automatically spins up or shuts down servers/environments as per need.

Cloud is accessible from anywhere in the world as long as one has an internet connection. Fortune 500 companies are making the switch to the cloud for better reliability, efficiency and reduced cost. The model “pay for what you use” has saved billions of dollars around the globe, which is allowing companies to utilize the money towards better investments and consequently business innovation.

Cloud computing is contributing towards technological advancement of the world we live in. Companies are utilizing the cloud to connect globally. We all use Cloud in our lives in one way or another. Google photos is just one basic example. We store all our memorable moments on google drive and we can access it from multiple devices anywhere around the world. There are many companies which provide Cloud computing. The leading three in today’s time is Google Cloud, Amazon Web services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

In the next blog, we will discuss in detail the services that cloud has to offer and how secure it is to keep your data on it.