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Traits of Cloud Computing
On-Demand Resources
In cloud computing, the customer gets a user interface or shell environment and with that, they can access all the processing power, database, storage, network and analytics without further human intervention.
For example Google Cloud can be accessed in various ways including:
Google Cloud Console, Cloud SDK and Cloud Shell, and Client Libraries
Self-Service
The cloud resources do not require human intervention and thus what you reserve or use is immediately accessible.
Offered over the Internet
The resources are offered over the internet and can be accessible from anywhere around the globe as long as one has internet connection.
Large Pool of resources available
The provider has a massive pool of computing resources that the customers can be allocated almost infinitely.
For example Google Cloud has 85 zones as of this writing. To check on the recent resources GCP has check on:
Google Cloud Infrastructure capacity.
source: Data Center
Elasticity
Cloud Resources can scale up and down rapidly depending on the computing resources required and is not static.
Reserve or Pay as You go
The resources are paid by usage and you only pay for what you reserve or use.
Why Businesses Need Cloud Computing
Cloud computing has revolutionized how businesses operate especially with the current state of the global Covid 19 Pandemic. In a nutshell, Cloud computing is meant to offer faster innovation, flexible computing resources, and economies of scale to businesses.
source:google
The following are the top benefits of cloud computing:
Scalability
Cloud computing is very scalable by allowing customers to upscale or downscale their IT needs when it is required. For example, an eCommerce can scale up their resources for Black Friday Sale and scale down when demand is low saving on costs. The PayAsYouGo model ensures that you only pay for what you use further making cloud computing highly scalable.
Flexibility
The cloud enables users to access files and collaborate globally using web enabled devices. This allows the users to be flexible and your IT personnel more diversified.
Speed to Market
Cloud computing enables ideas to be taken to the market more rapidly since the computing resources are provisioned at will saving business the pressure of capacity planning. This is what has enabled notable companies like Uber and PayPal to be able to scale very fast.
Security
Cloud providers offers a broad set of policies, controls, best practices and technologies to ensure that your apps, data and infrastructure are protected from common threats like DDOS attack. Furthermore, security is enhanced physically and remotely with numerous security patches and updates to ensure the offerings are UpToDate. In Google Cloud watch this video by Stephanie Wong to understand the extent to which google enhances GCP security.
source: hacks
Reliability
Cloud computing is made from the ground up to be highly reliable with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) promising 99.9999% availability of resources. Cloud computing offers easy global backups to your resources which means unless there is a global catastrophe, most of the time data loss is through users interaction with your resources as opposed to the infrastructure failure.
Hardware Integrity is always ensured with most of the cloud providers liaising with hardware vendors to ensure only the tested hardware resources are used by the cloud providers and sometimes the providers create their own custom hardware.
Productivity
Cloud computing allows IT departments to focus on business oriented productive work as opposed to other time-consuming IT management tasks like racking and stacking servers, software patch-up, hardware configuration, physical security provision, physical security testing, faulty hardware replacements etc. This makes businesses more robust, flexible and scalable.
Cost
Cloud computing offers a way to eliminate upfront capital expenses of buying, setting up and running data-center hardware and software.
The cost for electricity for running datacenters, water for cooling and IT expertise for Infrastructure management is very high and thus offsetting this initial capital expenditure offers businesses and startups a competitive advantage and economies of scale.
This list is by no means exhaustive and customers have a great deal to say about cloud benefits. Be sure to check out on this link some more cloud specific benefits.
