Cloud computing services have revolutionized the IT services marketplace, offering new opportunities for companies of all sizes. Cloud technology enables organizations to use a virtual IT structure and software that’s independent of an operating system. It provides a wide range of services like on-demand storage, computing services, and application development platforms.
Cloud computing is a key part of any digital transformation strategy. Companies are attracted by the lower costs and increased flexibility of cloud computing services. As most services follow a pay-as-you-go model, it’s easy to scale up or down as needs change because you only pay for what you need. Cloud computing also works well with mobile devices and typically comes with improved disaster recovery tools.
Why You’ll Want an IT Services Company To Implement it
While the benefits of cloud computing services are attractive, it’s vital to consider the challenges as well. Once you choose a cloud service provider, it’s difficult to change again without considerable effort. Additionally, many organizations underestimate the time and expense involved in the migration process to cloud services.
That’s why it’s recommended that you work with a reputable IT services company or consultant that specializes in cloud computing. Their experience with the loopholes and hidden costs of cloud computing services can save a lot of time, hassle, and money in the long run. You can avoid problems with security, accessibility, and outages, as well as surprises hidden deep in cloud computing contracts.
Best Cloud Computing Services
You have many different choices in cloud computing service providers. Here are the market leaders.
Microsoft Azure
The Microsoft Azure cloud platform offers more than 200 products and cloud services to build, run, and manage applications across multiple clouds, on-premises, and at the edge, with the tools and frameworks of your choice. It provides software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). It also supports many different programming languages, tools, and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.
One strength of Microsoft Azure is its high-speed and geographically decentralized infrastructure, which creates limitless options for disaster recovery plans. That ensures your critical application and data can run from redundant sites during recovery periods that last minutes or hours instead of days. While Microsoft Azure is used by two-thirds of the world’s Fortune 500 companies, its scalability makes it accessible for small businesses too.
Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform, offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Drive, and YouTube. Alongside a set of management tools, it provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, data storage, data analytics, and machine learning. Google Cloud Platform provides IaaS, PaaS, and serverless computing environments.
Google’s strength lies in big data processing tools, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning initiatives, and container support. Google’s BigQuery and Dataflow bring strong analytics and processing capabilities for companies that work heavily with data, while Google’s Kubernetes container technology allows for container cluster management and eases container deployment. Google’s Cloud Machine Learning Engine and various machine learning APIs make it easier for businesses to leverage AI in the cloud.
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon providing on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide a variety of basic abstract technical infrastructure and distributed computing building blocks and tools. Fees are based on a combination of usage, hardware, operating system, software, or networking features chosen by the subscriber-required availability, redundancy, security, and service options. Amazon markets AWS to subscribers as a way of obtaining large-scale computing capacity more quickly and cheaply than building an actual physical server farm.
One AWS service is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which allows users to have at their disposal a virtual cluster of computers, available all the time, through the Internet. AWS’s virtual computers emulate most of the attributes of a real computer, including hardware central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing; local/RAM memory; hard-disk/SSD storage; a choice of operating systems; networking; and pre-loaded application software such as web servers, databases, and customer relationship management (CRM). The AWS technology is implemented at server farms throughout the world and maintained by an Amazon subsidiary.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Oracle Cloud is a cloud computing service offered by Oracle Corporation providing servers, storage, network, applications, and services through a global network of Oracle Corporation-managed data centers. The company allows these services to be provisioned on-demand over the Internet.
Oracle Cloud provides IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and Data as a Service (DaaS). These services are used to build, deploy, integrate, and extend applications in the cloud. This platform supports numerous open standards (SQL, HTML5, REST, etc.), open-source applications (Kubernetes, Spark, Hadoop, Kafka, MySQL, Terraform, etc.), and a variety of programming languages, databases, tools, and frameworks including Oracle-specific, Open Source, and third-party software and systems.
IBM Cloud
The IBM Cloud platform combines PaaS with IaaS to provide an integrated experience. The platform scales and supports both small development teams and organizations, as well as large enterprise businesses. IBM Cloud offers a next-generation hybrid cloud platform, advanced data and AI capabilities, and deep enterprise expertise across 20 industries. Solutions are available depending on your needs for working in the public cloud, on-premises, or a combination.
IBM Cloud provides solutions that enable higher levels of compliance, security, and management, with proven architecture patterns and methods for rapid delivery for running mission-critical workloads. Available in data centers worldwide, across 19 countries with multi-zone regions in North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, users can deploy locally with global scalability.
CloudLinux
CloudLinux OS is a commercial Linux distribution marketed to shared hosting providers. It is developed by software company CloudLinux, Inc. Instead of a cloud-computing provider, CloudLinx is a cloud platform that can be built across internally hosted servers. For those with extensive expertise, CloudLinux offers the opportunity for more control of services and how they are configured. That makes it beneficial for companies that have already invested in internal IT infrastructure.
CloudLinux is built for virtualized cloud operations to power shared hosting services, by allocating and limiting server resources to each tenant. Additionally, each tenant is partitioned from the others to create a more secure environment. The result is a hosting platform that has built-in redundancy, stability, and security, in order to provide a better hosting environment.
Cloud computing services can offer your company new opportunities to reduce costs and improve efficiency. It’s a key part of any digital transformation strategy. For more information about cloud computing services, contact InApp. Put our expertise to work for you.
