You don’t need to be at the forefront of digital development to be in a position to hear the phrase ‘in the cloud’ being trotted out at meetings with monotonous regularity. It is a phrase that is frequently used and a phrase that is used with good reason because cloud-based solutions are currently at the forefront of digital advancements.
But what does it all mean and why is it now regarded as the default way to go for so many solutions? Also, how do you get to be in the cloud? These are all fair and reasonable questions to ask and we are here to help explain some of the intricacies to you.
Understand the past
To know why cloud-based solutions the way is forward, you don’t need to ask an enterprise cloud consulting guru, you need to look at the past and where we have come from. Not long ago anyone who operated in the digital realm would have needed to have servers of their own. These servers were used for company email, for database solutions and for hosting websites.
The bigger a company’s digital profile was, the more servers they needed. The more servers they need the more hardware experts needed to employ, the more racks they needed to purchase and the more they needed to spend on support architecture – this like uninterrupted power supplies and air conditioning units. It was a costly business and an inefficient one.
Putting things into the cloud as a means to solve all of this. Lower overheads and fewer concerns, all-round and a much more efficient operational set-up.
Managing latency
One of the biggest issues of old-school solutions is that all the capacity a company had was in one place. If there was a problem at their head-quarters then they were stuck.
Cloud-based solutions mean that load can be shared across a range of locations so that whoever is accessing the product can have the fastest and most positive experience possible.
Offsite storage
Anyone who has ever managed to lose the music or photographs that they have stored on their computer will tell you how important it is to have your digital assets backed up. But also, don’t leave them backed up on a hard-drive that sits on your desk – adjacent to the computer.
Off-site back-ups are crucial and the best way to ensure that your data and your memories are never lost or compromised. The cloud is a great way to ensure that this never happens.
Connectivity plays to the cloud
In the past one of the reasons that people preferred to manage their own server solutions was due to the fact that connectivity was slow. In short, uploading files and accessing remote servers was a slow and laborious process. So, while the idea of a cloud-hosted solution was good, the practicalities of accessing the servers rendered it impractical.
But that has all changed with the arrival of fibre connections and super-fast lines; it means large amounts of data can be up and down-loaded quickly and cheaply. And as a result, cloud-based solutions come into their own.