Ever since 2018, the public cloud sector has seen immense growth in its usage, and for good reasons; it offers higher levels of security and helps companies save huge costs. Today, the market is expected to reach a whopping $332.3 billion. As public cloud services have grown, enterprises have had an opportunity to choose best-of-breed technologies when deploying workloads to the public cloud.
Given the market’s expansion, a number of companies are flocking to take advantage of the pay-as-you-use model of the public cloud environment, not to mention the all-round support, maintenance, near-unlimited scalability offered by a public cloud service provider. But that’s not all. Public cloud users are experiencing way more benefits. Let’s see the top 7 benefits the public cloud can offer and why now is the time to fully embrace the cloud:
1. Unlimited storage
Every day, we create roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. Imagine the kind of on-prem infrastructure required to ensure the safe storage of this data. Not just that, there’s also the need to expand your premises to add more servers when the amount of data increases.
On the other hand, the public cloud offers limitless space. Organizations that have moved to the public cloud have realized that it is quite unlikely to surpass the storage space and performance the public cloud offers.
Small and medium businesses typically do not want to get into long-term contracts and commit to certain storage or bandwidth capacity because, a lot of times, they are not really sure about the real requirements. In such situations, public cloud hosting works out very well because it does not require a long-term commitment or investment. The cloud providers usually offer pay-as-you-grow models, which make the overall engagement extremely easy and hassle-free.
2. Freed up IT staff
With an on-prem infrastructure comes the need for on-site support that takes care of supporting servers, data centers, software applications, etc. However, when you move to a public cloud, all you need to do is hire IT staffing to maintain the network at your premises to ensure that there is no disruption in internet connectivity. The remaining part of support is carried out by the public cloud service provider. All cloud workloads are supported with consistent SLAs.
Your IT staff can be freed from maintaining the hardware, software, and networks in the cloud. Moreover, your cloud provider will take care of setting up the infrastructure, keeping it up-to-date, and consistently upgrading it.
All the duties of the public cloud are divided among the provider and your business. The responsibility of security of the cloud lies with the cloud service provider, whereas, you must take responsibility for your security in the cloud.
3. Reduced costs
Since you wouldn’t need to spend money to create an onsite infrastructure and maintain it, you can save a lot of money with the public cloud if your account is managed properly. In fact, companies can save an average of 15 percent on all IT costs by migrating to the public cloud.
There is no capital investment to purchase equipment. Public cloud cost is little to set up and organizations pay for only the resources that they use. The pay-as-you-use model helps you to be flexible and easily scale up or down. Lower energy cost as no internal servers are used. All you need to do is pay a monthly fee to get access to the public cloud.
4. Data recovery
There are many computing resources that come under the public cloud environment. The resources are spread out across different sites around the world. This acts as a lifesaver when you accidentally lose your valuable company data due to a sudden power loss or disaster. Since all computing resources are spread out in separate locations, you can rest assured that whatever you lost here must have been saved in another location. This ensures maintenance of uptime for users.
5. Flexibility
Since the cloud is everywhere, you can literally access your servers and applications anywhere, anytime. Therefore, you can allow your staff to work from anywhere in the world and remain productive even if they aren’t at the office. With the cloud, the data is automatically mirrored on the data centers located at other locations — freeing up the businesses from worrying about data backup or excess costs. This way, you get better delivery and collaboration and faster rollouts of new business initiatives.
6. Pay for what you use
Think of the public cloud as a huge building made of bricks only. You sign up for the bricks you need and pay only for those. Even though those bricks are still part of the building, they belong to you; that part of the building belongs to you.
On the other hand, think of building your own building and paying for all the bricks even if you don’t end up using them. See where I’m going with this?
The public cloud model is designed so that you only pay for what you use, saving money on unused resources. You can even choose to scale up or down, depending on your requirements. The cost goes up or down accordingly.
7.Improved security
Hands down, the public cloud is safer than your on-prem infrastructure. The majority of data leaks occur with on-premises solutions. The public cloud has expertise in building secure solutions because they attract the world’s most talented engineers. Take Google for instance. For security alone, Google employs a full-time Security Team that is composed of over 700 experts in information, application, and network security. And so, with the public cloud, you get access to highly skilled teams of IT professionals.
Google manages to stop 10 million malicious emails a minute before they ever make it into the inbox. Gmail blocks 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malicious emails from ever reaching users. It encrypts all data at rest and in transit. Scans thousands of web pages every minute for malicious intent.
Considering how up-to-date the public cloud is, security innovation in the cloud and other cloud-based solutions happens faster than anywhere else. Moreover, with the cloud, human control of your information decreases, so does your risk of data breaches.
Plus, at the end of the day, it’s not you who is directly responsible for the security of the cloud, it’s your cloud service provider.
Have you made the call?
It all comes down to saving money and ensuring full protection of your resources when it comes to choosing between a public, private, or hybrid cloud environment. Migrating, transitioning, and operating in the cloud is a paradigm shift for all organizations but in addition to a lot more benefits that are listed above, these provide saving cost, increasing efficiency, and ensuring full protection of your data. When you do move to the public cloud, you will see how it remarkably outweighs private clouds.
If you’re having trouble deciding what your next steps should be, the Google Cloud experts at MediaAgility will be more than happy to assist you. Speaking of, MediaAgility was recently recognized as a Niche Player in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud IT Transformation Services. As a client-centric company, our main focus is on delivering seamless solutions that meet our clients’ needs with a focus on driving efficiency, security, and agility in Public Cloud IT Transformation Services.
