How to Build your Cloud Computing Strategy

Developments in fields such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, nanotechnology, and biotechnology are continuously growing and amplifying one another, leveraging the demand for the computing resources they need to run, store and process the data.

Here comes the Cloud with all his offerings and benefits your company can use to manage that data and meet all your needs as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Either you have a big or small budget for your project, you need some storage resources for your solution or you just want to buy a specific cloud-based software for your business, having a Cloud Computing Strategy nowadays is almost vital.

• Low initial costs and pay-as-you-go for the used resources
• Significantly fewer investments in on-premise hardware
• Scale the loads during usage peaks and scale down when usage subsides
• Lower risk – especially for small companies or start-ups – paying-as- you -go and not making a long-term decision based on an idea which was not validated yet by the customers/users
• Speed and productivity – you can get a new application up and running in just a few minutes

All of the above can add up to significant cost savings and deliver the desired result for your project/application , stressing out the importance of your cloud adoption strategy.

Which Service model to choose?

1. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) – provides the fundamental compute, network, and storage resources for customers on-demand.
2. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)– provides customers the hardware, software, and infrastructure to develop, deploy, manage, and run applications created by them or acquired from a third-party.
3. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) -provides access to a service provider’s cloud-based software. Users will just access the applications on Cloud while the provider maintains the infrastructure, platform, data, application code, availability, security and performance of the application.

Which Deployment model to choose?

1. Public – the service provider owns, manages, provisions and maintains the physical infrastructure such as data centers, servers, networking equipment, and storage, with users accessing virtualized computing, networking and storage resources as services.
2. Private – the provider provisions the cloud infrastructure for exclusive use by a single organization.
3. Hybrid – an organization’s on-premise private cloud and third-party public cloud are connected as a single, flexible infrastructure leveraging the features and benefits of both: Public and Private clouds.

Which Cloud Service Providers to choose?

This technological wave is driven by some major cloud service providers like AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Google, IBM, and Microsoft Azure.

Nowadays, around 33% of the market are running their apps on AWS, 17.6% on Microsoft and 6% on Google.

Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform are more focused on the enterprise market, especially because of their integrations with Microsoft 365 ecosystem and respectively with all the tools provided by Google. On the other hand, AWS is the world’s most widely adopted public cloud platform which meets the needs of both big and small companies with all its countless features.

Before choosing any of them, every company should consider their requirements ; from security, compliance, performance to cost and risk capacity.

Whether we are talking about GDPR, PCI DSS or HIPAA , you should find a cloud platform that can help you meet compliance and security standards that apply to your industry and organization.

You need to trust that your provider will back you up if something goes wrong and will meet your businesses needs in terms of availability, response time, capacity, scalability and support.

Another top concern is how the architecture will be designed and incorporated into your projects so you can take advantage of using your cloud provider features and not just add another headache during the deployment and maintenance.

And of course, the price!

To estimate the budget for your project you need to understand the cost and the offers of the existing cloud providers.

It`s difficult to compare the pricing between different companies but, even without a deep research, you will see that the options are almost the same for everyone: Pay-as-you-go: per second used, per hour, gigabyte, or millions of executions, depending on the specific product or service.

No matter which Cloud Service Provider will best suit your needs, ultimately, Businesses don’t have to spend time and money maintaining and buying their own servers.  They just need to have a good Cloud Computing Strategy in order to take advantage of the off-the-shelf professional infrastructure and solutions given by Cloud Service Providers.