CLOUD BASED SOFTWARE

 

What is Cloud Based Software?

 Cloud has been one of the most promising solutions which has been adopted by many. Cloud has come to the rescue and solution to many problems across various domains. 

Cloud software refers to any software application or service that is hosted, accessed, and managed remotely via the internet, rather than being installed on a local computer or server which operates on cloud computing infrastructure. Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. You typically pay only for cloud services you use, helping you lower your operating costs, run your infrastructure more efficiently, and scale as your business needs change.

Examples of cloud software include systems like Salesforce, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack and Microsoft Teams etc. Cloud service provider includes ‘The big three’ —Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS. However, there are a host of other smaller or niche players that offer cloud services as well, including IBM, Alibaba, Oracle, Red Hat, DigitalOcean, and Rackspace.

Why businesses are shifting to Cloud?

Cloud computing gives your business more flexibility. You can quickly scale resources and storage up to meet business demands without having to invest in physical infrastructure. Let me demonstrate with an example.  For a high-traffic e-commerce platform, traffic and transactions dramatically increase during certain periods like Black Friday. With an on-premise solution, you’d need enough server capacity to handle these peak periods, which means most of the time you’re paying for unused capacity. This also requires significant upfront investment in purchasing and maintaining hardware, such as servers, storage devices, networking equipment, and cooling systems. Thus, with on-premises infrastructure, once you scale up, it is difficult to scale down. For cloud infrastructure, you pay only for how much you use with much easier provisions for scaling up or down. The servers are maintained by the cloud providers. In case of data loss, the chance for data recovery for on-premises set up is very low. On the other hand, cloud offers easier and faster data recovery through robust disaster recovery measures. Company can rely on the expertise and infrastructure of the cloud provider to safeguard its critical business assets.

Online content provider Netflix can support seamless global service by using Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS enables Netflix to quickly deploy thousands of servers and terabytes of storage within minutes. Users can stream Netflix shows and movies from anywhere in the world, including on the web, on tablets, or on mobile devices such as iPhones.