Moving to the cloud has become a vital process for businesses today. Cloud storage, cloud computing, and cloud migration make it seem like everything is surrounded by “the cloud”. But what exactly is the cloud? In this blog, let’s understand the concept of cloud, cloud computing, and its four important pillars in depth.

Defining the Cloud

The “cloud” refers to a group of servers that can be accessed via the Internet and has different software and databases running over them. These cloud servers are in data centers across the world, thereby reducing the burden from companies to manage them physically.

Here are the benefits of the cloud that businesses can attain:

Understanding Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the delivery of different services and resources using the internet. These include data storage, servers, databases, networking, and software.

It is a popular option for businesses nowadays as it provides several benefits of increasing productivity, speed, efficiency, performance, and security. Businesses keeping their files on a proprietary local storage device can use cloud-based storage to potentially save their data over remote servers.

History of Cloud Computing

The Internet got commercialized in the 1960s, but it wasn’t until the early 1990s and didn’t have any relevance for businesses.

But one of the renowned names in computer science, John McCarthy, enabled businesses to use expensive mainframes and introduced the whole concept of time-sharing. This turned out to be a huge contribution to the pioneering of the cloud computing concept over the web.

According to this, the evolution of cloud computing can be divided into three basic phases:

• The Idea Phase – This phase emerged in the early 1960s with the emergence of utility and grid computing and lasted till the pre-internet bubble era
• The Pre-cloud Phase – The pre-cloud phase started in 1999 and continued to stay till 2006. In this phase, the internet started providing the mechanism of Application as a Service.
• The Cloud Phase – This was the real cloud phase that started in the year 2007 when the classification of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS development got formalized. The previous years of computing have witnessed some interesting breakthroughs during these years by some well-reputed organizations.

4 Pillars of Cloud Computing

Businesses going for digital transformation require a modern analytic experience across public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. They expect to run analytic workloads wherever they choose – regardless of where their data may reside.

To give enterprises flexibility, enterprise-centric cloud engineering services empower them to get clear and actionable insights from complex data anywhere. Nitor Infotech’s cloud engineering services are potentially based on four foundational pillars:

Cloud Engineering strategy and consulting

Determine the current state of your business and its cloud readiness. Following this, businesses can create a personalized roadmap for streamlining application portfolios and data. This can help them:

• Control IT costs
• Deliver an improved end-user experience
• Envision the future business strategies

Cloud migration and optimization

Migrate your application, its data, and infrastructure to the cloud by managing cloud expenditure using advanced analytics. This can help businesses:

• Integrate with multiple cloud platforms as per their choice
• Enhance agility and flexibility
• Increase ability to innovate faster
• Stabilize increasing resource demands

Cloud architecture and native application development

Build and run applications to take advantage of the distributed computing offered by the cloud delivery model. This can aid businesses to:

• Empower modern application development methods within their organization
• Build faster release cycles
• Manage infrastructure effortlessly
• Develop reliable and scalable systems

CloudOps and DevSecOps

Monitor applications and infrastructure in real-time and automate configuration/deployment on VMs with the highest security. Along with this, you can also:

• Reduce infrastructure expenses
• Monitor and check deployment securely
• Increase transparency

Looking beyond the Cloud?

So, if the cloud has become a commodity, providing an evolving set of infrastructure capabilities enables us to shift our focus on the applications that run in it.

With these, businesses will be able to create innovative products that can certainly help them safeguard their data over the web. So, if you are looking for growth through innovation, the cloud is your go-to option that will make your system fast and flexible.

Get in touch with Nitor Infotech’s cloud experts to get the best of cloud services by building cutting-edge applications.