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Over the past decade, cloud computing saw a rapid growth and you must have made use of it several times whether you were aware or not. You might be wondering though why there is so much excitement about moving to the cloud and how best you can leverage it. You may also not be sure if moving to the cloud is a good decision given your scenario. Well, this article is just for you.

First off, the Cloud is a means of storing and accessing data and programs over the internet instead of your local server or personal computer. You probably know Software as a service(SaaS) examples Facebook, Gmail, Netflix, or Platform as a service(PaaS) examples Heroku, Google App Engine, Infrastructure as a service(IaaS) examples Google Cloud, or AWS. I will not go deeper into each cloud services category, but that is how diverse cloud computing goes.

What you get when you shift to the cloud.

1. Efficiency
   With cloud computing, you only pay for services that use and for the duration used. This means you are not billed for any redundant resources. A higher billing only comes with additional client usage which means even more revenue for you, so its basically a win-win situation.
2. Scalability
   With containerization, your application is automatically scaled up and down depending on the number of requests it processes. There is no additional configuration needed or waiting time latency with higher request traffic.
3. Security
   Whilst you may have cyber security experts, moving to the cloud only means you even have a larger team. This also means that your cloud service provider is liable in case of any security attacks.
   In addition, it’s so much easier to recover from security attacks while on the cloud as compared to on-premise.
4. Reliability
   Hosting your services with a cloud service provider ensures the availability of these to your end users much more than your on-premise alternative may ever guarantee.
5. Cost reduction
   If you are a startup, this is where cloud computing comes in handy. You don’t need to purchase a server computer, or hire extra personnel to manage the latter.

I’ve only covered some of what the cloud has to offer even though you need technical expertise to best configure for some of the benefits.

Considerations

Before moving to the cloud, you might want to first confirm if this is a decision you are ready to make.

1. Your application generates huge files. Repeatedly moving huge files up and down the cloud can be very costly. You might want to remain on-premise.
2. You have security problems on-premises. If there exist security exploits while still on-premise, chances are moving to cloud will not fix these. You need to fix risks before exposing the same to 7.8 billion potential attackers.
3. Your organization culture is not ready for a move to cloud. As an IT leader, you need to support personnel at your organization to deal with the “as is” and the “to be” states of your cloud application before making the shift.

Conclusion

Cloud computing is an evolving potential with even newer technologies that are meant to enable us do what we did yesterday better and faster today and tomorrow.