Why cloud computing?

Cloud computing adoption is often driven more by the advantages and benefits of its business and operational model than its technology model or location factors.

Cloud computing doesn’t have to be a binary decision between a fully public cloud and no public cloud. The benefit of the cloud computing model is that it gives you a choice in how computing resources can be provided and consumed by a business to suit its operating model in the most appropriate way.

Cloud computing-based resources can be in the service provider’s facilities or the customer facilities in the case of the Azure Stack portfolio (Edge, HCI, Hub), being a private cloud. Therefore, you can have on-premises cloud computing resources; it doesn’t always have to mean resources in a provider’s facility that are shared with others and accessible over a network, but that is the most typical deployment model, that is, the public cloud.

The core benefits of the cloud computing model over the traditional computing model are outlined in the following figure:

Figure 2.1 – Benefits of cloud computing

Other operational advantages include there being no need to replace failed hardware or address physical security for public cloud computing; the cloud provider manages the underlying hardware that hosts the resources. This means no CapEx to purchase hardware, although CapEx is still applicable in private cloud scenarios where hardware and facilities may be under your control; they may be at a third-party hosting provider’s facilities that provide the hosting for your private cloud.

However, there is a requirement in public cloud computing environments to provide security and protection for the customer systems and data, ensure it is redundant and available, protect the identities that access the systems and data, govern access permissions, and manage updates.

This section outlined the benefits of the cloud computing model. In the next section, we will look at cloud computing as an enabler and methodology rather than as tangible technology assets.