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Cloud Infrastructure

The Cloud Computing Standard

Jean-Paul Lacombe
Jean-Paul Lacombe
Chief Customer Success Officer Pentalog Americas

The era where Cloud Computing was a buzzword ended a while ago. More exciting words like Blockchain, Big Data, and Machine Learning have taken its place.

But, although its lost its place on the front page of “Tech Daily” it hasn’t become any less important. Cloud computing has evolved from being a novel technology to a standard tool used by everyone. Without cloud hosting, most projects based on those new buzzwords would never even have gotten off the ground.

Cloud computing has opened up innovation potential for startups worldwide.

Cloud Hosted Infrastructure

We’ve seen (and done) it first hand with our clients in Pentalog, but the trend has popped up everywhere. More and more companies are choosing to host their IT infrastructure in the cloud.

For one thing, it is extremely easy to do. Call up a provider, tell them what you want and they can click a few buttons to carve out your digital space. Need more computing power? Usually, you don’t even have to make a call. A few clicks on your profile will make this a reality.

Believe it or not, this feature is not particularly groundbreaking.  Cloud hosting has become a necessity – not a novelty.

Big Data means Big Hardware

Any startup that wants to launch a project based on anything involving Big Data, Machine Learning, or Blockchain is going to need a lot of computing power.

The amount of data necessary to process these types of projects is enormous and consistently increasing. More data requires more processing power, which of course in turn requires more hardware to do that. Purchasing and setting up the necessary equipment is not only time consuming, the entry cost of such an action would prevent many startups from ever getting off the ground.

In most cases it makes more economic sense to purchase cloud services instead of buying and building everything from scratch.

Cloud computing has helped democratize Big Data, without it we would only see big name companies pursuing these types of projects. Startups and larger companies worldwide are tackling all types of new projects with the cloud in the background powering everything.

Projects that involve technology like real time translation and voice recognition need so much data and computing power that it’s simply impractical for companies to start purchasing their own hardware.

Cloud computing allows more people to take on projects and is, from the background – fueling tons of technological innovation.

Downsides of Cloud Computing

After talking all about how the cloud is fueling innovation, it is important not to overlook its weak points. Purchasing cloud services, just like purchasing any type of service, results in a loss of control. When using cloud services you are giving up control of your servers, their maintenance, and their security.

However, this loss of control can be a positive instead of a negative. Cloud service providers usually offer 24 hour surveillance which means someone is always looking over your infrastructure – keeping it both secure and running. Most companies are unable to look over their own servers 24 hours a day unless they have a huge amount of resources.

If you find a trustworthy service provider they may be able to look over your servers better than you could in-house.

Most security breaches, whether a company uses the cloud or not, is caused by user error. One of the most effective ways to increase digital security is to train your staff and ensure that they are up to date with the best security practices.

What’s Next for Cloud Computing?

What is next for the cloud is that it will keep growing. More and more data will keep migrating to it.

Cloud computing may see some technology changes making it either more secure or more effective and it will even be replaced by a new technology one day, but its core ideas will stay the same: processing power and data storage on demand.

When Machine Learning, Blockchain, and Big Data lose their place as the buzzword of the day, cloud computing will still be there – back in a server room powering whatever IT innovation comes next. Offsite computing power is here to stay.

Most companies are no longer deciding whether or not to use cloud. They’re deciding on how to do it.

If you need help choosing a cloud provider for your next project, contact us today and we will connect you with one of our experts.

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