If your business has a requirement to host infrastructure of any sort, you’ve almost certainly heard a lot about Public Cloud Computing Providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
Businesses have been moving to the cloud in droves over the past few years to better enable disaster recovery, infrastructure management, agility, security, and more.
For those unfamiliar with these services, the benefits may not be immediately clear, so what are these services and what benefit can they offer?
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud Computing provides flexible, on-demand, pay-as-you-go, infrastructure for your hosting requirements.
Traditional infrastructure by contrast is more inflexible, requiring significant time, effort, and cost to provision and deploy.
Just as importantly, Cloud Vendors have many products that can simplify infrastructure management by reducing the need for costly maintenance.
As an example, using a traditional MySQL database server would mean provisioning the infrastructure then deploying and maintaining the database software (In addition to managing the servers operating system).
On something like AWS, this can be as simple as provisioning a managed RDS instance.
How Can Public Cloud Help My Business?
Elasticity/Scalability
With Cloud Computing platforms, it becomes much easier to deal with large increases or decreases in traffic by utilizing services like AWS Autoscaling.
Instead of overprovisioning your infrastructure to cover spikes in traffic, properly configured infrastructure can automatically scale out to meet demand and then back in after that demand subsides.
High Availability
Instead of needing to maintain contracts with multiple geographically distributed data centers, vendors like AWS already provide dozens of regions to provide your required level of HA.
Managed services like Amazon RDS provide options to easily provision Multi-AZ high availability instances, which can further simplify meeting HA requirements.
All of this combines to make high availability easier and less expensive to implement for your critical systems.
Security
Cloud vendors provide many tools to easily improve the security of your infrastructure and application.
Examples include:
AWS IAM provides granular permissions for AWS services to ensure that users only have access to the systems and information they need.
AWS KMS allows simple management and rotation of encryption keys and can be used with products like AWS Parameter Store to properly encrypt application secrets like API Keys.
VPCs and Security Groups make it simple to properly segregate your application environments at the network level.
Cost Savings
When properly managed by an experienced team (using modern Infrastructure as Code practices) with a properly architected application, utilizing Public Cloud can help meet your IT objectives while decreasing costs thanks to the numerous tools that can help simplify the management and maintenance of your infrastructure.
Summary
AWS (and other Cloud Computing vendors) provide clear benefits to your business operations such as better scalability, improved security, easier management, and cost savings.
If you’re looking for a company with proven expertise to help improve your Cloud infrastructure (or even help move your application to the cloud), let’s have a chat!
You can easily schedule a free, one hour initial consultation below.
