Advantages of Cloud Computing

The key to everything is what advantage cloud computing has to the average user? From our brief introduction, you are no doubt already seeing huge advantages to this business and computer operating system model rather than the more traditional model currently used by most businesses. There are many advantages to cloud computing, both glaringly obvious and the more subtle ones, that we are going to look at here.

The software applications are the first of many advantages of cloud computing. As all the applications you need to use are on a shared network of utility servers that you simply pay a small fee to access, this means that all a company has to do to access these applications is to plug into the network which makes it very fast to get started and vastly cheaper than buy, installing, maintaining and upgrading your own applications. This system is based on ‘multi-tenancy’ that is one application that everyone can share.

A similar analogy would be an office building where instead of every office having their own security company, utility company etc it would be more a case of all the offices sharing the cost of security and utilities for the entire building which brings costs down. The advantages of cloud computing software applications is that they are also designed to be both scalable and can be customised to the companies needs.

Another obvious advantage of cloud computing is the cost savings. By being able to just plug into the network and go you save in many ways. No cost of hardware purchase – all you need is your computer and bandwidth access, no cost of software license and installation – you simply pay a small shared multi-tenancy fee for the software application. No man hours wasted by your IT team in maintenance – instead you can dedicate them to business development rather than time consuming and costly problem solving within your own software and hardware system. Without the need for all the hardware of past systems, smaller office space is required allowing companies to streamline their outgoings on basic utilities and space cost.

Being more reliable and more secure are a definite advantage. The cloud automatically comes with access to upgrades in software that are compatible with other applications working within the same cloud. This makes scalability a huge factor to be considered. Also with several servers maintaining the cloud and its applications then you do not have to worry about server downtime from faults as if there is a problem then the cloud simply spreads over the server network if one of the servers has a problem.

Finally, one if the biggest advantages is that it's almost instant to turn on (or off). The idea that you can upgrade or downgrade your server capacity needs as and when you need to makes this extremely attractive.