Cloud computing allows businesses to scale their computing resources up or down as needed, making it a cost-effective solution for organizations of all sizes. It also allows businesses to access advanced technology and expertise without the need to invest in and maintain in-house resources.
Cloud computing is a model for delivering information technology services in which resources are provided over the internet as a utility, rather than being delivered through dedicated infrastructure or installed on a local computer. These services are typically provided by a cloud provider, who maintains the infrastructure and handles tasks such as security, performance, and scalability.
VALUE PROPOSITION Advocates of public
and hybrid clouds claim that cloud computing allows companies
to avoid or minimize up-front IT infrastructure costs.
Proponents also claim that cloud computing allows enterprises
to get their applications up and running faster, with improved
manageability and less maintenance, and that it enables IT
teams to more rapidly adjust resources to meet fluctuating and
unpredictable demand, providing burst computing capability:
high computing power at certain periods of peak demand.
MARKET According to IDC, the global
spending on cloud computing services has reached $706 billion
and expected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2025. While Gartner
estimated that the global public cloud services end-user
spending forecast to reach $600 billion by 2023. As per
McKinsey & Company report, cloud cost-optimization levers and
value-oriented business use cases foresees more than $1
trillion in run-rate EBITDA across Fortune 500 companies as up
for grabs in 2030. In 2022, more than $1.3 trillion in
enterprise IT spending is at stake from the shift to cloud,
growing to almost $1.8 trillion in 2025, according to Gartner.
The goal of cloud computing is to allow users to take benefit from all of these technologies, without the need for deep knowledge about or expertise with each one of them. The cloud aims to cut costs and helps the users focus on their core business instead of being impeded by IT obstacles. The main enabling technology for cloud computing is virtualization. Virtualization software separates a physical computing device into one or more "virtual" devices, each of which can be easily used and managed to perform computing tasks. With operating system-level virtualization essentially creating a scalable system of multiple independent computing devices, idle computing resources can be allocated and used more efficiently. Virtualization provides the agility required to speed up IT operations and reduces cost by increasing infrastructure utilization. Autonomic computing automates the process through which the user can provision resources on-demand. By minimizing user involvement, automation speeds up the process, reduces labor costs and reduces the possibility of human errors. Cloud computing uses concepts from utility computing to provide metrics for the services used. Cloud computing attempts to address QoS (quality of service) and reliability problems of other grid computing models.