A decade is an impressive time as far as advanced technologies are concerned. Over a decade, the clouds have managed to become a powerful and sought-after business tool. However, in the early 2010s people had completely different opinions about them. Let’s take a look back at how businesses viewed cloud technology back then, and why now is the ripe time to rethink our understanding of the cloud.
At the beginning of the previous decade, clouds were still forced to fight for user attention; businesses were not so keen to host their services in the cloud. At that point in time, certain could-related beliefs had already been formed. Here we will cover the two most common such beliefs and will explain why they can no longer stop the cloud from massively penetrating into business.
“Cloud entails the risk of losing control over IT infrastructure”
Delegating something that belongs to us to a stranger fundamentally contradicts human nature, hence we start feeling less secure and more anxious. The same goes for business – feeling complete control over IT infrastructure is important as well. Therefore, many companies were apprehensive of the cloud. They were still storing and processing data on-premise; hence they knew all ins and out of how their security was ensured and could make it more protected if necessary.
Currently, tens of thousands of businesses know that IT infrastructure security does not always depend on whose hands it is in. The world is seeing an increasing number of cyber threats equally dangerous for data in the cloud and on premise. The Multicloud Annual Research Report presented the findings after having surveyed more than 1,400 IT professionals and managers around the world. As it turned out, security became the number 1 priority for the vast majority of businesses.
Being afraid of losing control over data was quite understandable, but by 2022 the situation has changed. The on-premises environment is no longer considered more or less secure. Moreover, multi-cloud solutions are made available today, which, on the contrary, enables increasing data storage reliability thanks to geo-distributed redundancy and the most cutting-edge encryption tools.
“The cloud is more expensive than on-premise IT infrastructure”
Many factors influence how much it will cost to maintain cloud infrastructure, so one cannot say for sure that hosting data in the cloud is more expensive than storing it on a local server. It is also important to consider the way a business uses cloud resources and assess its IT costs management efficiency. The better cloud is aligned to business-peculiar workstreams, the less the cloud will cost. Moreover, in the most popular Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud model, one can flexibly manage the resources available – add or reduce them as needed – and pay only for the amounts of resources actually used. In order to ensure the same flexibility in addressing changes in demand when it comes to on-premise infrastructure, one will have to purchase expensive hardware, most of which will not be used most of the time, and this is irrational.
Cloud computing in 2022: a new reality
Because of outdated beliefs, some businesses still cannot see the cloud as a critical component of their successful operations. Nevertheless, cloud services market is growing rapidly; analysts still predict that it will be expanding at a record pace. It is expected to increase from $445.3 billion in 2021 to $947 billion in 2026, growing annually by an average of 16.3%. Although cloud is still far from a perfect tool, it has become vital for many businesses. By radically changing IT infrastructure ownership model, one can discover new opportunities enabling routine processes optimization and automation, better responding to changes in demand, scaling faster and solving other important tasks.
Our team is ready to become your guide to the world of cloud technologies and provide up-to-date information on how you can utilize cloud products in your business. We will offer the best solution suitable for specific business workstreams, taking into account budget and activity peculiarities; we will also implement it on Colobridge platform.
