Spending on public cloud services is expected to reach $482 billion in 2022, according to Gartner. By 2026, Gartner predicts public cloud spending will exceed 45% of all enterprise IT spending, up from less than 17% in 2021. This illustrates that appetite for the public cloud is clearly showing no signs of slowing down. Businesses of all sectors and sizes continue to move workloads and storage to public cloud platforms.
Yet for all the momentum to move out of one’s own data center and into the public cloud, sometimes decisions are made based on market momentum and influence and not based on what’s best for your individual use case.
The benefits of the public cloud have been well chronicled. However, reframing these benefits and how they might apply to your use case can bring clarity to any cloud-related decisions. In this post, I’ll examine the key benefits of the public cloud with an eye towards how these benefits can accelerate your digital transformation, improve efficiency, and help your business grow.
Pay-as-you-go pricing
With the public cloud, businesses only pay for what they use. In the traditional IT model, businesses buy or lease hardware and software that sits idle most of the time. Also, traditionally the hardware and software are an investment upfront as a capital expense (CapEx). In the public cloud, businesses can spin up instances (virtual machines) when they need them and turn them off when they’re done. Here, hardware and software CapEx are instead charged as an operational expense (OpEx).
Public cloud’s OpEx or pay-as-you-go model is ideal for businesses that are in growth mode that need the flexibility to scale up and down as needed. Pay-as-you-go pricing in the public cloud is not without its downside. Bandwidth costs can be a burden. A sudden or unforeseen spike in traffic or utilization can drive a bill up without notice.
Infrastructure management included
In the public cloud, the infrastructure is managed by the service provider. This includes things like patching, upgrades, and monitoring. This takes the burden off of businesses, which can focus on their applications and data. Additionally, this allows businesses to concentrate on their core competencies and leave the management of the infrastructure to the experts.
AWS and Azure both manage servers and infrastructure for their clients. AWS has been doing this for longer and has more experience, but Azure is catching up quickly. Both providers offer a wide range of services to their clients, from computing to storage to networking. They also both offer a wide variety of available tooling to help their clients manage their infrastructure. These tools include things like patching, monitoring, and upgrading.
While providers like Amazon and Microsoft do offer significant management of their cloud offerings, increased complexity and variety of services means that you’ll likely need additional management of cloud resources, especially if you are utilizing a hybrid cloud setup.
Improved efficiency
Public cloud providers have economies of scale that allow them to offer their services at a lower cost than most businesses can achieve on their own. This improved efficiency leads to cost savings for businesses that move to the public cloud. In addition, the public cloud allows businesses to run applications at a higher density, which leads to even more cost savings.
Hosting applications in the public cloud can improve the efficiency of your business. By moving applications and data to the public cloud, businesses can take advantage of the economies of scale that are available at the provider. Furthermore, businesses can run more applications on fewer servers, which leads to even greater efficiency and cost savings.
Improved efficiency with AWS or Azure comes from leveraging the right public cloud services. The ever-increasing catalog of services and tools can be a distraction to some engineering teams.
Faster time-to-market
When businesses need new applications or services, they can often get them up and running in the public cloud much faster than they could if they were to build them in-house. This is because the public cloud already has all of the components of infrastructure in place, and businesses can start using it right away. All they need to do is provide the resources that they need.
This benefit is especially apparent with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which allows businesses to develop and deploy applications without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. AWS and Azure both offer a wide variety of PaaS services, which makes it easy for businesses to get started.
Greater flexibility and scalability
The public cloud provides greater flexibility than traditional IT architectures. This is because the public cloud allows businesses to spin up new instances quickly and easily, which can be used for applications, testing, or data storage. Additionally, businesses can use the public cloud to scale their infrastructure up or down as needed. Instead of waiting for a new server or switch to arrive at the data center, the public cloud makes deploying and decommissioning new resources as easy as the click of a button.
Additionally, the public cloud offers an expansive offering of services that can be used for a variety of purposes. This makes it easy for businesses to get started with the public cloud and to find the right services for their needs. The public cloud also offers a wide variety of applications that can be used for a variety of purposes.
Public cloud providers are also able to scale their services up and down very quickly, which allows businesses to scale their applications as needed. This is ideal for businesses that are in growth mode and need the flexibility not found in traditional infrastructure. Both AWS and Azure have a very large pool of resources that they can bring online when needed. Also, both providers offer services that allow businesses to autoscale their applications. This ensures that the right number of resources are always available.
Improved security
The public cloud is typically more secure than traditional IT architectures. This is because the public cloud providers have teams of experts who are constantly monitoring for threats and implementing the latest security protocols. Moreover, the infrastructure is typically more secure than in a traditional IT environment because it’s segmented into different environments (development, test, QA, production, etc.).
Public cloud providers also offer a wide variety of inherent security services, such as intrusion detection and prevention, firewalls, and malware protection. They also offer services that help businesses securely move data to and from the cloud. Light Edge’s security and compliance experts provide additional support and peace of mind by proactively looking for vulnerabilities.
Check out our blog: Building Resilient IT Systems: Lessons from the CrowdStrike IT Outage
Better performance and uptime
Public cloud providers have a better track record for performance and uptime than traditional IT architectures. This is because public cloud providers have more resources than most businesses. Public cloud providers are also able to provide better performance and uptime. Additionally, the public cloud is always up to date with the latest hardware and software.
This means that businesses can rely on the public cloud for their critical applications and services. What’s more, businesses can rest assured knowing that their data is safe and secure in the public cloud.
Getting maximum ROI out of your cloud investments
The public cloud has a number of business benefits that make it an attractive option. Before making the switch, however, there are use cases and a variety of considerations to assess. Increased performance and resiliency found in the cloud is accompanied by increased complexity. If all of this seems overwhelming, don’t worry – our team is ready to help.
