Whether you’re an e-commerce business managing heavy traffic during the holiday shopping season or a research firm crunching huge sets of data, you can take advantage of top-tier IT infrastructure without spending a fortune on hardware. This is the power of cloud computing, and it’s becoming more commonplace as organizations seek greater flexibility, scalability, and cost-saving potential from their IT solutions.
The “cloud” started out as a tech industry slang term for the servers and networking infrastructure that make up the Internet. As more and more computing processes moved to these servers, people began to refer to them as “the cloud” in technical diagrams. Today, there are different types of clouds, such as public clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds and multiclouds. But no matter which type of cloud you use, every cloud abstracts, pools and shares scalable computing resources across a network.
Some of the biggest benefits of cloud computing include the ability to access files from anywhere there’s an Internet connection and the ease of collaboration when working with remote teams. Additionally, switching to cloud computing removes the need for businesses to update and maintain their own servers, saving them money and IT staff time.
There are several types of cloud services available, including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS). SaaS is the most widely used cloud service model. It delivers a fully functional software program to the end user, taking care of all updates and maintenance for them.