Integrating cloud computing solutions into your business can be a strategic move. In some instances, these solutions can offer greater speed and efficiency compared to in-house IT resources. For example, the new technological capabilities within Microsoft Azure provide users with faster access to data and more efficient application deployment. As a result, cloud computing offers benefits of cost savings, flexibility, agility, and scalability.
Some of the benefits of integrating cloud computing include:
Cost Savings
A typical IT department is expensive to operate. A hardware infrastructure with multiple servers and other support components is costly. With cloud computing, you can access these resources on-demand as needed from a service provider who you can pay for the resources you use.
Flexibility
Cloud computing solutions enable you to customize your technology environment to meet your business needs by deploying, scaling, and uninstalling services like virtual machines or database servers as needed.
Scalability
When you’re looking at scaling up your IT environment to accommodate increased workloads or customer growth, there are several ways to do it with cloud computing solutions. You can purchase additional servers from an outside vendor or rent more server resources from a provider; you can also choose to add storage capacity through a public storage service.
Types of Cloud Computing Solutions
Some of the most popular types of cloud computing solutions include:
Software as a Service (SaaS)
SaaS is the delivery of shared software applications over the Internet using a usage-based pricing model. The whole application is hosted at a central location on the Internet, and users simply access it through a browser or mobile device. SaaS provides multiple cloud tenants access to one application.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
IaaS providers are responsible for managing the hardware. They offer services to their customers via the Internet. This allows businesses to use cloud computing without having to buy and maintain their own hardware. Infrastructure as a service is often used for testing, development, or other situations where IT departments need extra resources on a short-term basis.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Platform as a service (PaaS) is essentially a type of cloud computing that provides users with a virtual online platform to build, test, deploy, and manage applications. PaaS vendors provide access to software development tools, programming languages, libraries, and services hosted on their infrastructure.
