The infrastructure business is changing!
Gone are the days when companies had dedicated data centers or server rooms with racks and racks of servers. Outsourcing the maintenance of infrastructure to a cloud provider has proved beneficial in several ways. Let's see how!
Traditionally, companies built data centers to store sensitive, competitive, and critical information. The facility had to be well protected with both physical and virtual security and access measures. Other running costs included server licenses, hardware costs, higher than normal power consumption, and facility maintenance costs. Usually, such companies also needed to invest in building a disaster recovery center, which served as a secondary backup—a precautionary measure, should the primary data center go down.
Although it seems that having a private data center makes sense for a company, given that it has full control over it, in reality, it is both risky and challenging to safeguard your applications from cyber attacks and other potential hackers. Even financially, it doesn't make sense to keep servers running around the clock when the usage of the applications is low, such as during a local holiday season. On top of that, you would need dedicated staff that is responsible for applying patches, installing updates, and ensuring that all applications are running smoothly.
This is where cloud computing and hosting comes to the rescue!
The term cloud refers to the infrastructure and/or services that are hosted and maintained by a provider and that can be accessed over the internet. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are some of the well-known cloud providers, but there are certainly many more that provide various cloud services. There are primarily three service models that the cloud providers offer:
Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS): In this model, instead of purchasing and maintaining their own computing hardware, organizations borrow the necessary infrastructure from one or more service providers by paying a fee. They then install and maintain the required software on this infrastructure.
Platform-as-a-service (PaaS): In this model, in addition to the infrastructure, the service provider also provides the operating system and development tools required to build applications.
Software-as-a-service (SaaS): In this model, the applications are provided by the service provider. These applications can be accessed over the internet. The responsibility of upgrading the software and fixing the bugs lies with the service provider.