In the past decade, the fault-lines of technology have been realigned by the advances of touchscreen technology and smartphones. While these developments have revolutionized the consumer electronics and IT sector, the prospects and next-generation capabilities of cloud computing services have arguably leap-frogged both in importance, scope and its business-critical nature.
While it may be the single most important technological advance in recent memory, most people are confused about what cloud services mean and why it’s become so important for so many business in virtually all industries. Many feel that cloud computing, or “the cloud,” is a technology that is intricate and complex and has a nebulous definition and scope. It is hard to see data and that cloud services are essential for the ecosystem in which data is exchanged, modified and created.
Data is a very empowering tool and enables business stakeholders make informed decisions that are based not on whims or hastiness but on cold-hard facts. Rich troves of data can be a source of information, but also needs to be organized, secured and translatable for insiders. For small to medium-sized businesses, the challenge with cloud services lies in how to organize this information and how to make it accessible to decision-makers and everyday users. While cloud services are transformative and has changed the IT landscape by making us do things faster and get the right information more seamlessly what does the cloud really mean and what are the common misconceptions that businesses and end-users have?
The cloud is a new technology
The cloud is a new technology, right? If new means being rolled-out and used in the nineties, then yes, it is new. Businesses first started to jump on the cloud computing bandwagon when internet providers amped-up their bandwidth capabilities. Companies like Sales Force started to leverage this new-found internet bandwidth to deliver applications through their website. Services through a website seems simple and intuitive to us now but it was a pioneering concept back then. The evolution of cloud services have been happening at a blistering pace.
Cloud Services and Scalable Storage
You may have heard about the cloud before but what does it actually mean? The cloud is a term to refer to off-site servers often within a large data center. Businesses and individuals access these servers via the internet rather than having physical servers on location. Its main benefit is scalability. If a business grows rapidly and needs more storage space it can easily get more via the cloud rather than having to buy more servers or invest in costly IT infrastructure. It’s like having a pool that can get bigger whenever you have lots of friends over. What does this mean for individuals using the cloud? It means you no longer need tons of storage on your computer or mobile phone as all of your pictures, files and videos can be stored on the cloud and accessed from anywhere. In fact, you may be already using the cloud without knowing it. In fact, you may already be using the cloud without even knowing it. Have you ever got on your phone and had all of your contacts sync automatically? That’s thanks to cloud storage. This also means that in the future, devices can become more compact. Having storage on hand could become a thing of the past.
I have never worked with the cloud.
The cloud is when a service is being fed through the World Wide Web to your computer monitor, smartphone or tablet. For example, when you are mirroring the images on your phone to your computer, using Apple’s iTunes platform, you are using a synching process via the cloud. Cloud computing is the infrastructure that is used to ensure that when you’re in an online mode, the pictures you have stored on your smartphone, is delivered to your computer. It is extremely difficult to avoid using cloud technologies in your day-to-day life.
The cloud is an unreachable technology for most SMBs
In the world of the cloud, renting is a great option, especially for small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs). In the real world, if you design and construct a building, you need to determine how many floors and units are in that building. In the cloud universe, it works differently: the building does not have a certain, limited number of floors and units. The building can get bigger in size and you can rent-out more units as you grow. The cloud will mitigate your growing pains and is scalable.
The cloud is limited in scope
The cloud is a catalyst for Big Data and uses a number of different technologies, such as the cloud. The cloud has helped accelerate Big Data and bolstered its potential. Most of the world’s data is actually small data. It is tiny data bits, such as Facebook likes, to streets on Google Maps and so forth, which when aggregated and combine form Big Data. The cloud churns through Big Data in a multitude of ways and can help you slice and dice through it all and put everything in a manageable context.
The cloud is too metric-heavy and unanalyzable
Not everyone is a data scientist. You don’t have to be mathematician wizard to understand all of this data coming your way. If you are pulling datasets from government websites, collecting traffic data streams and going through the latest Ocean discoveries, there are tons of online resources that can help you cut through the clutter and get the information you need (and most of them are free). You can parse the information and help delineate patterns that exist.
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Cloud services has made the delivery of on-demand computing resources, from software applications to services, over the web for everyday users. A pillar of this widely-used technology is that it meets business demands and is metered and on a pay-as-you go basis. The business-critical features of the cloud has made it an indispensable part of everyday business and small business and medium-sized enterprises are no longer looking up to attain the cloud. With connectivity a necessary and critical part of business life, you can now access all of your IT resources through the cloud. If you need help to get there, Fidelity IT Solutions, a Toronto-based cloud computing service provider can help you with your private, public and hybrid cloud needs.
