The Benefits of Cloud Based Applications: Should I Put My App in the Cloud?

More and more companies are migrating their apps to cloud infrastructure-as-a-service providers. Here’s why.

• Cloud as the New Standard
• 3 Reasons You’ll Choose Cloud
• 5 Ways Cloud Saves Money
• SSD Cloud Hosting

Cloud as the New Standard

According to the 2016 State of the Cloud report, more than nine in ten companies (93%) are using some type of infrastructure-as-a-service – basically, a cloud server hosting provider for at least one of their applications. The vast majority of large companies (82%) use a hybrid cloud, integrating public and private components.

Public cloud is incredibly popular among organizations of all sizes. Seven out of every eight firms (88%) run apps on a public cloud, while well over half (63%) run systems on a private cloud.

These statistics are obviously compelling on their own, but why is this trend toward cloud occurring? Let’s look at three basic reasons and five financial reasons.

3 Reasons You’ll Choose Cloud

Why are cloud-native applications becoming the most commonplace technological choice for businesses developing new software? Simply put, cloud based applications are fast, secure and allow for 100% seamless growth. Below, we explore these reasons in-depth.

#1 – It’s fast.

The architecture of cloud is built fundamentally for high performance: premium reliability and speed. The ability to make fast updates and change seamlessly is powerful.

Traditional provisioning of apps in the enterprise could take as long as months, notes Rachel Roumeliotis of O’Reilly. “This lack of speed severely limits the risk that can be taken on any one release,” she says, “because the cost of making and fixing a mistake is also measured on that same timescale.”

If you use a cloud for your applications, you would literally be able to deploy a new update hundreds of times per day – every few seconds. By patching every few seconds, you not only are able to be much more fluid and adaptive but can stay ahead of security threats. Also, generally speaking, the agility afforded by cloud allows you to be more experimental and, in turn, more competitive.

#2 – It’s secure.

Anything that moves rapidly can be disconcerting because the faster something goes, the more critical it becomes that the design of the system is sound, explains Roumeliotis. Meaningfully constructed cloud systems “balance the need to move rapidly with the needs of stability, availability, and durability,” she says. “It’s possible and essential to have both.”

Mistake prevention has cost enterprises millions in the past as they’ve created their IT systems. Now mistakes can happen, and the enterprise effortlessly recovers, often within seconds.

#3 – It allows for 100% seamless growth.

Larger, more robust systems are required in order to handle larger amounts of requests of course. In traditional legacy architectures, scaling occurred vertically; companies purchased larger servers. Everything was generally tedious and costly.

During that era, enterprises had to use peak usage forecasting to guide their capacity planning. Organizations bought something large enough to fit their needs for the upcoming year or whatever period of time they would use the equipment. These predictions were essentially impossible. Companies regularly hit their maximum available resources on Black Friday and during other major events. At other times, the servers went underutilized.

In that context, smart companies started to do two things:

• Transition from vertical to horizontal scaling using commodity machines
• Convert large servers into numerous smaller virtual private servers, designating each for distinct tasks.

As the public cloud market, specifically infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), began to gain ground, those two trends merged. Strong public cloud hosts provided secure and reliable hosting that achieved both of these purposes – horizontal scaling and virtualization. Meanwhile, businesses were able to scale horizontally with thousands of cloud servers.

5 Ways Cloud Saves Money

Here are five specifically financial reasons to move to the cloud – beyond the VPS Hosting itself – from Richi Jennings of Webroot:

1. It nixes underutilization.

“Cloud computing brings natural economies of scale,” Jennings says. “The practicalities of cloud computing mean high utilization and smoothing of the inevitable peaks and troughs in workloads.”

2. It cuts your power bill.

The cloud is significantly more energy-efficient than legacy infrastructures are. Idle servers waste power. The improvement in hardware utilization means power use drops.

3. You don’t pay as much for your workforce.

The cost of staffing often is the biggest IT expense that a company must face. Cloud reduces that part of your budget by entrusting a third party to perform infrastructural maintenance, server patching, security monitoring, and other tasks.

4. There is no capital expense.

If you invest in your own hardware, you have to put forward capital upfront. That’s not the case with cloud.

5. Off-load the redundancy issue.

When you transition to cloud infrastructure, you no longer have to worry about buying additional hardware so that your system is redundant for reliable business continuity, comments Jennings. “Typical clouds have several locations for their data centers, and they mirror your data and applications across at least two of them,” he says. “That’s a less expensive way of doing it, and another way to enjoy the cloud’s economies of scale.”

SSD Cloud Hosting

Obviously, the last thing you want to do is move over to the cloud and then realize the system you selected is letting you down in terms of speed. At Atlantic.Net, our SSD Cloud Hosting runs on 100% enterprise-grade solid-state drives – up to 100 times faster than hard disk drives.

VPS hosting is just one of the many hosting services offered by Atlantic.Net – We also offer dedicated, managed and HIPAA compliant hosting services. Contact us today for more information on any of our services!