Cloud computing is a ubiquitous piece of jargon and one of the hottest buzzwords in the industry today. While Cloud computing’s on-demand nature has made it the infrastructure of choice for many startups, established brands are struggling to adapt due to their existing infrastructure and a lack of internal expertise.
Recent research says that, by 2022, over 80% of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) deployments would be in the cloud, reflecting a paradigm shift in IT infrastructure deployment strategies.
How does the cloud benefit digital transformation?
The primary goal of a successful digital transformation is to expand business potential through modern, streamlined, digital workflows. Efficiency and agility are the key attributes of a successful company, achieved through the simplification and automation of vital workflows. Key aspects of your business that you should be targeting include:
Administration – A huge amount of time and money is wasted on updates to documentation, databases, websites, inventory counts and more. All these tasks can be automated through the cloud, freeing up valuable employee time.
Expedite development – Instant access to server hardware is one of the most significant benefits of the cloud. This allows development teams to spin pre-compiled instances up and down quickly, rather than going through the setup process every time. You can also achieve reduced downtime by testing in an environment isolated from your “live” server instances. Once you are confident to go live, you can redirect traffic at the click of a button, significantly reducing the risk and complexity of the development process.
Security – You can run regular system backups with seemingly endless processing and storage resources in the cloud. This can be highly beneficial for cloud-native databases, where reverting to previous snapshots can prevent the loss of vital customer data. The burden of maintenance is also with the provider, which typically results in delivering up-to-date software and hardware that is more resilient against cyberattacks.
Automated load balancing – For performance-intensive applications, the cloud is an ideal choice. Traditional in-house server implementations can’t scale, resulting in processing constraints that can be remedied only through hardware upgrades. With the cloud, you can perform 24/7 analysis of system workloads.
