While the public cloud has become an increasingly imposing force in recent years, 2016 is turning out to be the year of the cloud, and it is still just the beginning. Amazon recently released 1st quarter earning for Amazon Web Services, their massive worldwide computational infrastructure for rent, at over 2.5 billion (with a B) dollars, on track for over 10 billion this year, a whopping 70% increase over last year. All this even in the face of increasing competition from Microsoft, Google and VMWare.
And yet estimates are that only 5% of computational work is now running in the cloud. Even when you take out computation that can’t move to the cloud for one reason or another, that still leaves room for continued rapid growth in the coming years. What is clear is the the cloud is not a fad or a niche market, but instead it is the way computing is going to be done for most business and workloads in the future.
Why the public cloud growth?
Three main reasons
Consistency of Pricing
Traditional IT involves a little bit of throwing the dice and hoping for the best. That server might last 3 years, or it might last 5. Your email server may need to be replaced next week, a sudden multi-thousand dollar hit. With cloud solutions you pay a set monthly or annual fee and it just always works. No replacement costs, no worries. You can set predictable budgets. Plus you can pay for resources only when you need them, paying for more resources during weekdays, for example, and less on weekends.
Reliable Services
If you run your own services in-house, or rely on a small shop to run them, you risk outages and downtime when things go wrong. Cloud services are backed by large, redundant infrastructure and almost never go done. You can stop worrying about your IT and worry about your business.
Ease of Use
Modern cloud based services are easy for developers and end-users. An end-user gets a seamless experience with modern responsive interfaces. Developers and administrators don’t need to reinvent the wheel and can use world-class tools to get their job done faster.
The cloud is here to stay, how you use it is up to you. One does not have to jump fully into the cloud, you can start with one or two services and move more over time. If you are starting a new endeavor, however, the cloud is the fastest and most cost effective way to have top notch IT operations running in hours or days. Contact a CloudFast sales representative to learn about how the cloud can help your business today.
