With the advancing digitalization in companies and the associated cloud offerings, more and more private individuals as well as companies regularly come into contact with the term cloud and cloud computing. But what is cloud computing?
What is cloud?
The cloud represents the conceptual place of data storage, where the cloud computing, stands for the application and way of acting in the cloud environment. This innovative IT solution approach helps companies to be more agile in responding to their business needs by moving the business away from complex IT applications and on the other hand, providing a variety of services for the success and growth of the business. Basically, cloud computing is about the dynamic provisioning of applications, i.e. as soon as companies need resources, they can call them up immediately. These resources are delivered through the cloud as a network.
What is cloud computing?
"Cloud computing" is the on-demand provisioning of IT resources over the Internet at usage-based prices. Instead of purchasing, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services such as computing power, storage, and databases on demand through a cloud provider such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Businesses regardless of type, size or industry use the cloud for a variety of use cases. These include data backup, disaster recovery, email, virtual desktops, software development and testing, Big Data analytics, and customer web applications. For example, companies in the healthcare sector use the cloud to develop personalized treatments for patients. Companies in the financial services sector use the cloud for real-time fraud detection and prevention. In addition, video game developers use the cloud to deliver online games to millions of gamers around the world.
What are the benefits of cloud computing?
The benefits of cloud computing range from cost reductions, flexible and scalable IT, increased innovation and collaboration capabilities, and improved data protection to optimized IT security. Many companies have already recognized this and are relying on solutions from the cloud.
Innovation through agility
The cloud gives you easy access to a wide range of technologies. This allows you to accelerate innovations and realize almost anything imaginable. Resources can be scaled to meet your needs. So you can freely experiment and test new ideas to differentiate customer experiences and transform your business.
Cost savings
With the cloud, you forgo large capital investments in favor of variable costs, and instead pay only for the IT resources you actually use. What's more, IT resources in the cloud are less expensive for you as a business because the basic costs of acquisition, operation and maintenance are borne by cloud providers. By modernizing outdated infrastructures with the help of more efficient cloud solutions, you are able to reduce your operating costs.
Elasticity
With cloud computing, you don't have to provision too many resources at the outset to handle future peaks in business activity. Instead, you provision the amount of resources you actually need. You can scale those resources up or down to instantly increase or decrease capacity as your business needs change.