Effective Ways to Use Cloud Computing to Achieve Business Goals

Cloud computing has become wildly popular in the past decade as it offers many benefits for businesses. With its ability to deliver speed, agility, resilience, and visibility, the cloud has emerged as a critical enabler for organizations to create, expand, and compete in the modern economy. To avoid losing money on the purchase, storage, and upkeep of your servers and data centers, cloud computing services offer a cheap and secure alternative to store and access data on demand. 

The use of cloud computing has been attributed to boosting competitiveness by reducing costs, enhancing flexibility and elasticity, and maximizing resource efficiency. As a technology, cloud computing is much more than the sum of its parts. Features of cloud computing can facilitate the digital revolution; native technologies allow more productive ways of working and growing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities.  

While the benefits and uses of cloud computing in business are clear, there are countless services available today and countless ways of implementing them, so getting started can sometimes be overwhelming. Here’s how organizations are putting the advantages of cloud computing to work to drive business value. 

Cloud Computing Service Delivery Models 

Here’s an overview of how each model drives business value for organizations.  

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) 

Infrastructure-as-a-Service enables a company to take advantage of its own data center by providing networking and a sizable database for storage and servers. IaaS providers will build an environment based on a company’s needs, allowing them to charge only for the space they utilize. Additionally, the cloud-based business solution is simple to use. IaaS includes cloud computing from most big cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. 

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) 

Platform-as-a-Service lets users access a full cloud platform, including infrastructure, software, and tools for creating, deploying, and managing applications. PaaS eliminates the need to construct and manage an on premise, more expensive, complex, and rigid platform. PaaS simplifies application management and development because it relieves businesses of needing to maintain on-site infrastructure. Because PaaS already provides a solution stack, which includes many of the tools and software programs developers use daily, it is also scalable and enables more economic development. 

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)  

One of the most popular cloud computing delivery platforms is Software-as-a–Service, enabling companies to use cloud-based products without having to set up different platforms. SaaS is perfect for lean businesses that need a lot of communication, particularly if employees are located remotely.  

Cloud Analytics 

Cloud analytics describes applying analytic algorithms on the cloud against data in a private or public cloud to deliver a result of interest. Cloud analytics involves the deployment of scalable cloud computing with powerful analytic software to identify patterns in data and extract new insights.  

Here is how cloud analytics can help drive growth and scalability to achieve the business benefits of cloud computing and goals.  

How to overcome the challenge 

Outline all your needs and demands from the cloud to combat this, explore the various ways you could utilize it in the future, and address any ethical issues in cloud computing adoption. In this manner, you may stay focused on your objectives and use the cloud. Following an understanding of your requirements, you can proceed with the appropriate training and implementation.  

Big Data Analytics 

Data analytics is not a new concept. The phrase “big data” was first used in the late 1990s to refer to the huge data sets frequently found in various sectors, including finance, energy, healthcare, spaceflight, and other scientific fields. With the development of analytics tools like Apache Hadoop, it has become easier to evaluate and draw conclusions from enormous data sets. As analytics workloads and technology moved to the cloud, a new name emerged – cloud analytics. The ability to execute complicated data analysis on big data sets and create cloud-based business solutions has dramatically improved thanks to cloud analytics. 

Cloud analytics empower organizations in the following ways: 

Cost optimization: By anticipating product returns, businesses can reduce the costs associated with it. They can then determine which products are most likely to be returned, enabling them to take the necessary steps to minimize losses from returns. 

Innovation: Insights from big data can be used to tweak business strategies, develop new services, optimize service delivery and improve productivity. These can all lead to more innovation. 

Efficiency improvements: Big data can significantly increase operational effectiveness. Big data technologies can gather valuable client data by connecting with them and attaining feedback.  

Testing and Development on the Cloud  

A software development environment is one of the best use-cases and features of cloud computing. DevOps teams can swiftly create development, testing, and production environments and adjust to unique requirements. Automated provisioning of real and virtual machines is just one example though. 

One of the major advantages of cloud computing is how it helps the DevOps process, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native innovations (e.g., microservices, serverless, and containerization). Even though these technologies have accelerated innovation, self-sustaining cloud infrastructure is still required to support the wide range of services. 

Cloud Storage 

The ability to automatically save files to the cloud allows those files to be easily accessed, stored, and backed up from any device with an internet connection. Organizations can pay for cloud storage instead of maintaining their data centers for storage. They can do this without worrying about managing the storage infrastructure’s ongoing upkeep. Increased availability, speed, scalability, and security are advantageous for data storage environments. 

Depending on the laws and concerns regarding sensitive data that are at play, organizations can maintain data either on-premise or off-premise, in private or hybrid cloud architecture, for enhanced security. 

Disaster Recovery and Data Backup 

Another advantage of employing cloud computing for businesses is the cost-effectiveness of a disaster recovery (DR) solution that offers quicker recovery from a mesh of several physical locations at a significantly lower cost than a standard DR site. 

Creating a DR site and testing a business continuity plan with fixed assets may be very expensive and time-consuming. However, when established on the cloud, businesses may replicate their production site and continually replicate data using VM and configuration settings, saving considerable time and resources to continue business operations.  

Additionally, data backup has always been a challenging and time-consuming operation. There has been a marked increase in the use of cloud-based backup services as of late, primarily due to the vast improvements. Organizations can automatically dispatch data to any location without security, availability, or capacity issues. 

Conclusion  

NETSOL Cloud Services partnering with AWS offers the most open and secure public cloud computing for businesses, advanced data and AI capabilities, and deep enterprise expertise across multiple industries.  

Learn how NETSOL Cloud Services can help your organization with the following: 

• Modernize existing applications 
• Build and scale cloud-native applications 
• Migrate existing on premise workloads to the cloud 
• Data analytics  
• Strategy and assessment  

We have a wide range of experience developing customized solutions across industries. Contact us today to discuss your requirements.