Why use Cloud Computing? Advantages and Disadvantages

Cloud Computing has been a buzz word in the IT world from the last few years. When it first appeared, like many things, a lot of people has dismissed it as being next big thing, but cloud computing has certainly lived up to expectation and truly shift how Information technology arm of business function today.

Cloud Computing is made of two terms Cloud and Computing, the first term refers its flexibility in terms of moving around and scaling up (or down) on the fly, without affecting end-users, rather like a cloud; Second term is obviously more obvious, it refers to taking advantage of computers for real-world calculations. In fact, cloud computing is similar to distributed computing, where is program runs on many connected computers to produce a result.

Types of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing comes in different flavors which are tailored based upon the client’s need. Some companies might just want to use clouds for infrastructure, some may want hardware as well as software, some just want software, and others may want everything.

By the way, SasS (software as a service) and PasS (platform as a service) are two of the most popular cloud computing services.

SaaS (software as a service)

PaaS (platform as a service)

IaaS (infrastructure as a service)

HaaS (hardware as a service)

EaaS (Everything as a service).

Advantages of Cloud Computing

Here are some of the main advantages of cloud computing, which will help you to decide whether to move onto clouds or not.

1) No worry to maintain Infrastructure

2) Cost Benefits

3) Backup and Recovery

4) Reliability

5) Scalability

6) Convenience

7) Environment Friendly

8) Resiliency, Redundancy and High Availability

9) Performance

10) Reduced Time to market

11) Increased Storage Capacity

12) Location Independence

Disadvantages of Cloud Computing

There is nothing like free lunch in this world. Everything has advantages and disadvantages and cloud computing also not different. In the last section, we have seen some big benefits of moving to clouds but let’s now analyze some cons of cloud computing.

1) Regulatory Requirement

2) Privacy and Security of Confidential data

3) Latency

4) Vendor Dependency

6) Limited or No Control

7) Increased Vulnerability

That’s all about the  advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing. You can see cloud computing has serious pros to offers and the way it’s going, I am sure the list of cons will be reduced. cloud computing’s growth is natural and it’s coming from the real need of people and small scale companies, start-ups who cannot afford to set up and run their own data centers, and in many cases only need high availability, recovery, and resiliency for their services.

If they turned out lucky and need to scale quickly, they can easily do it by using trusted and matured cloud computing companies like Amazon web services. It’s a win for both service providers and customers, and work best for biggies like Amazon and Google, who has built their cloud infrastructure for their own personal need, rather than keeping cloud computing business in their mind.

In short, Cloud computing offers a cost-effective solution for infrastructure, platform and software need of people and companies which need aims to provide the same level of services like biggies, but can’t afford massive data center costs.