Cloud Computing Services

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing and its associated solutions provide access to a variety of computing resources and products through the web, including development tools, business applications, compute services, data storage, and networking solutions. These cloud services can be hosted at a software vendor’s data center and managed by the cloud services provider or onsite at a customer’s data center.

Cloud Computing Defined

In simple terms, cloud computing allows you to rent, rather than buy, your IT resources. Instead of investing heavily in databases, software, and hardware, companies can access their computing power via the internet, or the cloud, and pay for it as they use it. These services include, but are not limited to, servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and business intelligence.

Cloud computing provides the speed, scalability, and flexibility that enable businesses to develop, innovate, and support IT solutions effectively.

Cloud Computing Basics

When a company decides to “move to the cloud,” it means that its IT infrastructure is stored offsite at a data center maintained by the cloud computing provider. An industry-leading cloud provider manages the customer’s IT infrastructure, integrates applications, and develops new capabilities to keep pace with market demands.

For customers, cloud computing offers more agility, scalability, and flexibility. Instead of spending resources on legacy IT systems, customers can focus on strategic tasks. Without a large upfront investment, they can quickly access the computing resources they need and pay only for what they use.

Cloud Computing Benefits

Several trends push businesses across all industries toward the cloud. Traditional business methods may not deliver the agility to grow or provide the platform or flexibility to compete. The explosion of data from digital businesses is pushing data center storage costs and complexity to new levels, demanding new skills and analytics tools from IT.

Modern cloud solutions help companies meet the challenges of the digital age. Instead of managing IT, organizations can respond quickly to a fast-paced and complex business landscape. Cloud economics deliver business value and reduce costs, helping enterprises achieve their full potential with cloud investments.

Cloud computing offers a superior alternative to traditional IT in areas such as:

Cost: Eliminates capital expenses
Speed: Instantly provisions space for development and testing
Global Scale: Scales elastically
Productivity: Increases collaboration, predictable performance, and customer isolation
Performance: Provides better price/performance for cloud-native workloads
Reliability: Ensures fault-tolerant, scalable, distributed systems across all services

How Cloud Computing Fosters Innovation

Cloud customers benefit from having the latest innovations and emerging technologies built into their IT systems, as the cloud provider handles developing new capabilities and features.

With the right cloud provider, customers can leverage a modern cloud computing architecture to innovate faster, increase productivity, and lower costs. Integrated cloud architecture (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS) allows businesses to move from operations to innovation, delivering new apps and services, including AI, chatbots, blockchain, and IoT. Companies can harness data to gain predictive insights and drive better outcomes for their customers.

How Cloud Security Builds Trust

Moving to the cloud eliminates the headaches and costs of maintaining IT security. Experienced cloud providers continually invest in the latest security technology to respond to threats and help customers meet regulatory requirements.

Leading cloud providers invest in every layer of security as part of their overall design across global data center regions. This multilayer secure cloud approach offers the level of security required by businesses.

How the Cloud Connects Business Processes

Business processes describe how work is done from beginning to end. Integrated cloud solutions enable organizations to manage and assess the costs and benefits of technology projects better. For organizations struggling with disconnected processes and data silos, the cloud offers a way to transform operations. Complete cloud application suites eliminate data silos and enable integration and intelligent business decisions.

Types of Cloud Computing

There are three types of clouds: public, private, and hybrid. Each type requires a different level of management and provides a different level of security.

Public Cloud: The entire computing infrastructure is located on the cloud provider’s premises, delivering services over the internet. Multiple tenants share the IT infrastructure.
Private Cloud: Exclusively used by one organization, hosted either on-premises or at the cloud provider’s data center, offering the highest level of security and control.
Hybrid Cloud: Combines public and private clouds, hosting critical applications on-premises for security and control, with secondary applications at the cloud provider’s location.
Multicloud: Uses multiple cloud computing and storage devices in a single architecture.

Cloud Computing Services

Three main types of cloud services are available: SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.

SaaS: The cloud provider hosts the customer’s applications, accessed over the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis.
PaaS: Provides developer tools for building and managing applications without maintaining the underlying infrastructure.
IaaS: Offers on-demand access to infrastructure services via the internet, where customers install, configure, and maintain software on cloud-native solutions.

How Cloud Consumption Works

Cloud consumption means using cloud applications or consuming cloud infrastructure. Understanding infrastructure resource usage and consumption is critical, as it represents an organization’s ability to serve customers, innovate, and lower operational expenses. The best cloud providers help customers clearly understand the cost of services and what they can expect to pay.

Cloud Computing Challenges

Many organizations are still deciding whether to migrate on-premises workloads to the cloud. Although cloud technology is pervasive, most enterprise applications and infrastructure remain on-premises. IT leaders often hesitate to move critical applications to the cloud due to unclear migration paths for legacy assets and doubts about public cloud services’ readiness to meet enterprise needs.

How E-Startups Kenya Helps You Migrate to the Cloud

E-Startups Kenya’s industry-leading cloud computing platform helps businesses migrate to the cloud while reducing IT modernization costs. Businesses can preserve existing investments with familiar tools and avoid rewriting code to migrate software assets. Elastic capacity via “cloud bursting” provides the necessary capacity without oversubscribing. The most significant savings come from eliminating capital expenses by lifting and shifting workloads to the cloud and retiring data center assets.

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