What is cloud adoption?
If we define cloud in simple words, we can say that the cloud consists of software and services residing and operating on the internet instead of a local computer. Many companies are adopting cloud to reduce cost and easy accessibility. Many industries are taking advantage of adopting cloud services like health care, marketing, advertising, retail, finance, and education.
Healthcare: Many Medical organizations re-using cloud services to store data of their patients, managing marketing, and human resource-related tasks.
Marketing and advertisements: Marketing and advertisement agencies are using hybrid cloud adoption strategies to publish their customer-relevant content for a local and worldwide audience.
Retails: A sound internet strategy is important for a successful e-commerce strategy. Cloud adoption allows e-commerce enterprises to market and stores their product data by spending less money.
Finances: A finance organization needs efficient expense management, human resources, and customer communication; therefore, financial institutions are now using cloud services to store email and marketing data.
Education: Online education is gaining popularity all over the world. By using cloud services, educational institutes can utilize online lectures, assignments, and online grading.
Companies varying in size from each other can also take advantage of cloud services.
Large companies: To ensure the smooth functioning of enterprise organizations need heavy IT investments by adopting cloud strategies, efficiency can be improved, and the cost of maintenance and security staff will be minimized.
Small and mid companies: To achieve the targets small and medium organizations need to increase their IT staff if they engage in cloud services it provides them an efficient and effective solution that takes minutes instead of days.
Entrepreneur startups: Adopting cloud-based service will minimize the cost of an expensive IT infrastructure. Many cloud-based services are offering monthly fee-based services. Don't use plagiarised sources.Get your custom essay just from $11/page
How to cloud adoption works
Organizations must keep the following steps in mind while considering cloud adoption
Assessment: Before adopting cloud executives and IT experts must analyze opportunities and challenges, they can take benefit from the experience of other organizations already using cloud services.
Planning: While conducting research to adopt cloud, companies must plan their specific cloud strategy. They should look for a platform that fits their industry, and they should decide public, private, or hybrid cloud to go for.
Adopting: In this stage, IT leaders should look for risk lowering strategies, and they must fully understand the functioning of service software so that they can easily evaluate future strategies.
Optimization: Having a regular meeting with team executives to discuss their cloud computing strategy will help to create new solutions for further processes and tasks.
Benefits of Cloud adoption
Cloud services are providing opportunities for companies to choose the best-suited service delivery model for their business.
Benefits of cloud adoption are given below:
Reduced capital Expenditure
Capital expenditure can be defined as money used to purchase hardware, building, and managing IT house infrastructure. But if we look into cloud adoption, we don’t need infrastructure equipment as storage infrastructure can be made available from the data center. The cloud service providers are responsible for providing infrastructure and provisioning resources (software and hardware) for the company to suit business needs, and the company can save the money needed for upgrading hardware and buying software licenses. In cloud service, a company can get resources according to its business needs, and redundant resources can be returned back. The company will not require hiring IT personnel to maintain the infrastructure. Cloud also facilitates to expand a business without spending on purchasing in house equipment.
Scalability, Flexibility, and mobility
Cloud users can easily scale or descale the infrastructure. Cloud users can access the resources from remote locations by using any device like Laptop, Smartphone, and Tablets. Users can access data files round the clock and can work on these files from anywhere at any time; you don’t need to visit your office to do these activities. These benefits can play a vital role in enhancing productivity. A cloud model enables users to stay connected by mobile phone.
Easy to maintain and upgrade
Cloud service providers are responsible for the management of infrastructure (server, storage, software, network, bandwidth, etc.). These facilities can help your company to minimize the role of IT personnel to monitor the IT department. Cloud service providers have a large team of experts to ensure flawless services. These experts regularly upgrade the software that saves time and money for users. Whenever a new solution or patch is upgraded, it becomes available to all users of that cloud service without any additional cost.
Enhance IT security
Security is very important for every organization. Many organizations compromised data to avoid security breaches or attacks. Cloud computing provides a more secure environment by implementing robust intrusion detection and prevention systems. To protect the data, regular security audits are performed. A cloud service relieves its users by making data secure and safe.
Ensures business continuity
This benefit helps users to seek Uninterrupted IT services to ensure business operations are smoothly running during any disaster such as technology outage, fire, and flood or hardware failure. In the case of in house IT system, it takes many days to restore business operations. But cloud services provide remote access of data; that’s why during such time, users can still continue their business activities. With all these benefits there are many other advantages of cloud services if an organization want to launch a new product or service they don’t need to spend money on latest technologies and supporting system all these services can be available from cloud services.
Disadvantages of Cloud computing
Although Cloud computing has many benefits, there are a few drawbacks, and you must consider these drawbacks while going for cloud computing services.
Network connection Dependency
To use cloud computing, you need continuous availability of an internet connection. If you don’t have the internet, this is not possible to send or retrieve files. If due to any reason like a storm or during an outage you lose the internet you will have to face downtime. Cloud service providers may face some issues during any natural disaster; therefore, you should choose a service provider having a good name in the market.
Limited Features
All cloud providers are not working in the same way. If you start with a free package, you will have limited bandwidth, and you have to choose a premium option to get more space and more bandwidth. Usually, it will cost a lot to get unlimited bandwidth.
Therefore choose such service providers who are offering cloud storage, backup needs, and virtualization according to the demand of your business and make sure that your business can handle charges to pay for the services you are going to get.
Loss of control
You are handling your data to another party to take care of it, and you expect that they will maintain data servers and data centers the same as you. You will not have control over sever like in house servers, and your service providers have control over these. If you have any concerns, you should talk to the service provider.
Security
In the last few months, few cases of cloud hacking have been reported, all cloud service providers are not secured as much they claim. You will never want to get your business data hacked. This is a problem that you have no idea which service provider you should choose. If you want some special security features added, it may add some extra cost in your package.
Technical Issues
If there is any technical issue you yourself can’t do anything, you just have to contact the service provider for help. One other issue you may face some providers are not available round the clock for technical support. Therefore while buying service, choose a provider who is offering 24/7 support to clients.
There are countless benefits of Cloud adoption, but there are also some drawbacks. You should research well before selecting a provider. If you do so, you may save yourself from being trapped in limitations like speed, space, and availability. Always choose a service provider offering customer service every time and should have an ongoing record of providing security to its customers. You can minimize these drawbacks if you choose a reliable service provider for your business.
Challenges while adopting cloud services
There are a few challenges you may need to deal with while adopting cloud services.
Educating staff
Staffs working in companies are of different ages and have different skills. Organizations are needed to educate their staff about cloud services on how to use and how to minimize daily operational challenges and must provide them security training.
Improving Process
It persons of the organization must have a command to transfer data to different service providers for adjusting the demand and optimizing the processes. Therefore companies should invest in the training of IT people.