Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources via the internet, with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, etc.

Why is it called "Cloud Computing"?

The Cloud got its name when early Engineers needed a simple way to diagram complex networks connected through the internet. So they drew the bubbles around them, that looked like clouds and the name stuck.

Organizations of every type, size, and industry are using the cloud for a wide variety of use cases, such as data backup, disaster recovery, email, virtual desktops, software development, and testing, big data analytics, and customer-facing web applications. For example, health care companies are using the cloud to develop more personalized treatments for patients. Financial services companies are using the cloud to power real-time fraud detection and prevention. And video game makers are using the cloud to deliver online games to millions of players around the world.

With cloud computing, the business can become more agile, reduce costs, instantly scale, and deploy globally in minutes. Cloud computing gives you instant access to a broad range of technologies so you can innovate faster and build nearly anything you can imagine, from infrastructure services such as compute, storage and databases, to the Internet of Things, machine learning, data analytics, and much more.

You can deploy technology services in a matter of minutes and get from idea to implementation several orders of magnitude faster than before. This gives you the freedom to experiment and test new ideas to differentiate customer experiences and transform business, such as adding machine learning and intelligence to applications to personalize experiences for customers and improve their engagement. You don't need to make large, upfront investments in hardware and overpay for the capacity you don't use. Instead, you can trade capital expense for the variable expense and only pay for IT as you consume it.

Where is Cloud storage actually located?

Nothing is Up there! It turns out, internet infrastructure is actually very much earthbound. Every server and data center that makes up “The Cloud” is on land and chances are when you upload something to the cloud, you are not sending stuff up but you are sending stuff down through the ocean. Optical fiber - The Undersea Cloud.

With cloud computing, you access resources from the cloud in real-time as they're needed. You can scale these resources up and down to grow or shrink capacity instantly as business needs change. Cloud computing also makes it easy to expand to new regions and deploy globally in minutes. Cloud infrastructure is all over the world so you're able to deploy the application in multiple physical locations in just a few clicks. Putting applications in closer proximity to end users reduces latency and improves their experience. No matter location, size, or industry, the cloud frees you from managing infrastructure and data centers so you can focus on what matters most to business.