In businesses, rapid growth in e-commerce and digital marketing has increased the demand for computational resources. Substantial databases can be turned into meaningful information by utilizing features like machine learning and artificial intelligence. But handling Big Data can take quite a toll on the network architecture and the server. This is where cloud computing services come into play.
Case Study
The coffee house chain Starbucks collaborated with Microsoft cloud services and digitally transformed their app experiences. Starbucks wanted to automate their coffee makers so numerous recipes can be made easily with just the flick of a button. Cloud services along with IOT proposed a guardian module to maintain and identify the issues with their machines and automatically add the new customer recipes.
The reinforced learning of app data allowed them to customize the drinks and give the user an authentic experience. And all the new recipes could be stored in the cloud and sent directly to the coffee machines automatically. This personalization positively impacted direct marketing and sales.
Life before and after Cloud Services
Before Cloud services were embraced in organizations, the primary server ran all communications and file systems. So if this server were corrupted, all the data would be lost. And the server infrastructure has to be regularly maintained and updated in terms of hardware and software to ensure smooth functioning. Individual workers generally processed all the server information on their office desktop.
But, the introduction of cloud computing services gave them the freedom to access the data as long as they had access to computers and the internet.
Cloud Computing – What is it?
Cloud computing is the Internet-based service that provides storage, databases, networking, system resources, and processing power without direct active management by the user.
When the database is extensive, cloud computing allows for reduced queuing time in servers and efficient processing. It also benefits with remote data access to the employees, which is essential for all work-from-home projects, especially in the pandemic. According to the 2019 Survey, 94% of software experts confirmed their organizations used cloud computing services.
Benefits of Cloud Computing
- Reduces expenses on hardware maintenance
- Allows efficient collaboration in projects despite remote working conditions
- Ensures automatic data updates, accommodating up/downscaling data storage, and
- Provides a secure backup
Despite all the benefits as an emerging technology cloud computing can be expensive to migrate immediately. With more third party companies investing to host these services, the cost will reduce immensely in the coming years. There is also a risk of vendor locking, where organizations might find themselves locked into a certain cloud provider since it is very difficult to shift the database to a new platform in cloud computing.
But there are multi-cloud and hybrid strategies which ensure data accessibility even when the service provider goes out of the market. If you are worried about threats regarding data security there are private cloud deploying services which would protect sensitive information.
Any business can migrate towards cloud computing services depending upon their need for data security and accessibility. They can deploy the cloud from any of the four cloud computing models.
1. Public Cloud
The word public itself is self-explanatory. The shared services are available to the general public for free or can be operated as a pay-per-use model and provided by third-party services. The most commonly deployed public cloud models are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine, IBM Cloud, etc.
- In the Public cloud, the third party is responsible for managing and maintaining the data centers, establishing connectivity, deploying new products, releasing product updates, configuring and assembling servers.
- This makes it quick and easy for the cloud user to deploy and scale the cloud according to their requirements.
- But public clouds could be more vulnerable to data theft since the resources are shared publicly. Not only that, the performance of the cloud depends upon an individual’s computer configuration and internet connection.
- Since a third-party organization hosts all the services, there is not much room to customize the cloud to suit your business perfectly.
2.Private Cloud
- Private cloud provides computing services to a particular organization and selected authorized users.
- Ubuntu, HP Data Centers, and Microsoft are the most common examples.
- Private cloud ensures a high level of data security and privacy by internal hosting so that sensitive client data and other confidential information are not accessible to any other party.
- Private cloud is only accessible within the organization so that data resources can be scaled only within the capacity of internal computational and infrastructure resources, and the company needs to hire technically skilled IT engineers to manage and maintain the cloud.
3.Community Cloud
- A community cloud is a collaborative systems service to be accessed by a group of several organizations and share the information among them.
- Community cloud is the place for joint projects and applications; this distributed infrastructure allows various departments or mutual businesses to work together.
- Any government organization in the country that collaborates with each other and handles similar audit and privacy requirements can use the community cloud. They can commission their project together and update it on the cloud for easy synchronizing and tracking.
- Community cloud is not ideal for every organization since the database size and requirement for each employee can vary, but the cloud only offers a fixed amount of data storage, and bandwidth is shared among all community members.
4. Hybrid Cloud
- A hybrid cloud is the balance between public and private cloud services.
- This cloud service is dedicated to creating a unified and automated computing environment where critical activities with sensitive information are securely performed on a private cloud, and non-critical activities are carried out on a public cloud.
- With dual infrastructure, the hybrid cloud is secure and ensures conventional risk management. But hybrid cloud services are costly and challenging to deploy and maintain.
- After choosing what type of cloud to deploy, companies need to select the infrastructure suitable for their applications and computations.
Cloud Computing Infrastructure
There are three major types of cloud computing Infrastructure a company can use.
Software as a Service (SaaS)
- SaaS is an on-demand software that caters to the particular application required by the customer where the service is hosted using the cloud.
- The most common example is an application like Gmail that runs online directly in the browser, where the service is hosted by the Google Cloud server.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- The IaaS cloud provider manages features like storage, server, and networking resources and delivers them to subscriber organizations through Virtual machines via the internet.
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are such examples. A business can also opt to build its private cloud and implement automated data handling.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
The PaaS service supplies a Virtual environment for developing, testing, and managing software applications. Google App Engine (GAE) is a cloud services platform that provides Web app developers and enterprises with access to Google’s scalable hosting.
The cloud services market trends show us the market size was valued at $264.80 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach $927.51 billion by 2027. AWS leads the cloud computing service leader for Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and subsequently, Microsoft Azure is expanding to provide hybrid deployment services, and at third position Google Cloud is holding with $11 Billion annual run rate as the fastest-growing, building out industry approach and sales scale.
The practicality and feasibility of cloud computing are primary reasons for the shift in the paradigm of global adaptation of cloud computing services. Its promising ability to cut infrastructure costs led to an increase in the adaptation of cloud computing services in major software companies. Still, financial companies are yet to utilize these cloud computing services due to the potential risk of security protocol breaches due to an insecure interface or account hacking.
In the future, with upgraded security protocols, financial institutions can store data, provide customer services, and carry out complex transactions faster and with trust via the internet.
How can vajra help:
As a SaaS company, how you present your services to your target audience with B2B marketing strategies is very critical to your business growth. The core message as well as your unique selling proposition should be delivered to the right target audience at the right place at the right time. As a 360-degree digital marketing agency, we bring you a comprehensive and thought-through approach to project your brand to your prospective customers.
We create successful partnerships that deliver digital marketing requirements like marketing automation, content writing, social media profile creation, search engine optimization, lead analytics & generation, top SaaS metrics and many other services. We assist you in developing your business by helping you identify the business objectives using accurate and exhaustive data analytics, lead customer channels, and digitally reconstruct your business.
For more details, get in touch with us. You can also connect with us on LinkedIn / Instagram / Facebook for updates to give your business a complete digital transformation.
