Cloud Computing is a trove of servers, data storage, and computing power accessible to anyone, anytime from anywhere over the internet. The term “Cloud” came into existence because of the network diagram.
Cloud is a group of servers placed together connected via ethernet in a data center or connected over multiple data centers. Clients can then access this data center via the internet over the HTTP or HTTPS protocol. As a client, when you send data over the internet to the cloud, it will first authenticate your request, and check whether you are authorized to make these requests. Once verification has been made, the data which you send gets replicated over multiple servers, to ensure high availability and reliability of it. It can also go across multiple data centers. Cryptographic hashes like MD5 are needed to ensure data reliability. Suppose, your operations are in India and you cater to customers who are situated in Ireland. You can host your data or application in Europe which will warrant that customers can easily and without any delay access the material.
Advantages:
The advantage of migrating to the Cloud is as follow:
Scalability:
Migrating your data center to the cloud ensures that the workload can be scaled as per usage. As users, you do not have to worry about hardware limitations. This is administered by the cloud providers.
Cost:
Users do not have to worry about updating and upgrading their physical servers as it is the job of the providers. The maintenance of existing hardware, development of new products to enhance the quality, and specialization in the issues of the cloud are on cloud providers.
Performance:
You can scale up and down according to your usage. Also, you can replicate data to different regions to guarantee minimum latency when serving files to customers.
Disadvantages:
- Major issues are when your cloud providers are down. As a user of this service, your customers will face downtime and it can be a very expensive affair. Therefore, relying on one provider can turn out to be a costly affair.
- Data security can also be an issue if it is not configured properly. Successful migration from physical to the cloud requires meticulous effort. The business use case should be carefully laid out and accordingly, the migration should be strategically laid out, unless you want it to become an egregious affair of cost and complexity.
- Cost can rapidly increase as usage grows. Therefore, it is suggested and a good practice to monitor your services, in real-time.
- Additionally, vendor lock-in is a real issue. Suppose you are using AWS for all your services. Now, switching from AWS to GCP is going to be a time-consuming and costly process. This is an issue especially when your current cloud provider cannot provide certain services you need.
Every coin has two sides and so does Cloud Computing. It may have certain disadvantages but the advantages are umpteen. This field has completely changed the way businesses operate. It is a rapidly changing and growing field, which is only growing more sophisticated with time.
