The global cloud computing marketplace is expected to reach US $1251.09 billion by 2028. Having emerged somewhere around the turn of the 21st century, the cloud computing marketplace has formalized into unique service and deployment models helping millions of businesses (and customers) inadvertently.
Were it not for cloud computing technology, we might still be bereft of the many conveniences we take for granted. Cloud computing companies have helped businesses off-load the bulk of IT resource management to off-shore vendors, bringing down the cost of doing business and increasing ROIs. Therefore, the question for entrepreneurs and interested prospects isn’t whether to avail cloud solutions or not, but how to?
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing refers to the outsourcing of IT resource management by an organization to third-party vendors. Clients pay on the go for the computing resources they avail and are billed on a pro-rata basis.
Is Cloud Hosting Better than Traditional Web Hosting Traditional web hosting is mainly of two types, dedicated and shared. In dedicated hosting clients pay upfront for one or more servers from the service provider. There are caps to digital utilities such as bandwidth, CPU, and RAM.
Shared hostings are more profound amongst small and medium enterprises. This model allocates a single server to multiple clients, hence the name shared. Since multiple websites populate a single server, the scope of scaling is minimized at the time of rising website traffic. Worse, if the server experiences downtime, it will affect all the business assets hosted on its digi-scape.
The benefits of cloud computing supersede these limitations. Cloud vendors host websites on virtual servers. Workloads are equitably distributed across multiple clusters with data mirroring mechanisms running in the background. In the event of a server going down, secondary servers maintain functional stability and business continuity.
What Type of Data Storage Mechanisms do Cloud Vendors Offer?
The uses of cloud computing for business are endless. A crucial step before signing the SLA with a cloud vendor is to understand the deployment model that best suits your needs. There are three kinds of data storage models that vendors offer:
1. Private Cloud
A private cloud is an end-to-end apparatus that is either solely owned and operated by the organization or managed by a third-party vendor. Naturally, if you are to manage every step of the logistical workflow, then that requires periodic investment upgrades.
Not to mention, that self-operated data warehouses leave a massive physical footprint and require specialized manpower. As a result, private cloud undertakings turn out to be capital intensive.
2. Public Cloud
Such services are offered over the public internet wherein multiple companies opt for shared use of applications. An off-shore vendor manages the cloud infrastructure and rents out the same to multiple users. It needs to be said that due to increased subscription rates, the notion is that security risks attached to this model are relatively greater than private settings.
3. Hybrid Cloud
This is an intermix of both public and private clouds. Organizations subscribing to the same create private infrastructure for mission-critical data (such as customer info.) and let third-party vendors take up the management of tertiary interests off-shore.
How Much does Cloud Computing Cost?
This is a rather tough question to answer. You should perform an audit of your current IT infrastructure which should help you identify computational necessities in terms of a cloud environment. In fact, you can bifurcate the same into direct and indirect costs. Direct costs cover license fees, bandwidth allocation, cost of equipment, server capacity, and the likes. In the same vein, indirect costs include workforce management, workspace rent, and hardware maintenance among others.
While we’ve summarized the journey for a better understanding, the cost varies as per the requirements of each business. However, if you’re looking to get a ballpark figure then it costs approximately USD 400 per month for one cloud server. This could go upto USD 15,000 to avail the entire back-office infrastructure as a service.
How Appinventiv Helped its Clients with Cloud Computing Solutions?
The world’s largest furniture retailer, IKEA was facing challenges in gathering customer information for marketing purposes. The brand was also facing challenges with customer onboarding as assigning a sales representative to every customer was getting difficult considering the heavy footfall.
Appinventiv provided a custom ERP solution for IKEA on the cloud that not only gave customers the real-time status of products’ availability but also collected their information to then use as marketing assets.
Our efforts led to the creation of a cloud-based solution that is today getting adopted at over 7 more IKEA stores. The solution is also touted by the brand as one of the biggest sources of ROI measurement.
