The global cloud computing market is a multi-billion dollar industry with a wide range of providers and offerings. While the concept of cloud computing is not a new phenomenon, its rapid increase in popularity brought with it some misconceptions and myths. These myths could be preventing your company from experiencing the full potential of the cloud. Before moving forward, let’s answer a few basic questions:
What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services over the internet such as servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence. This provides organisations with faster innovation, as well as increased resource flexibility and agility.
What is the cloud?
At the most simple level, “the cloud” is the internet; more specifically, the remote servers you access over the internet as well as the databases and software that run on the servers. When someone says something is “stored in the cloud” they mean the file is stored on a remote server that is accessible over the internet.
What is the difference between the private, public, and hybrid cloud?
The private cloud is operated for a single organisation and can be managed and hosted internally or externally. It can be accessed either over the internet or a private internal network and only to select users.
The public cloud is delivered by third-party providers over the internet and can be accessed by the general public. The service may be free of charge or a paid subscription fee.
The hybrid cloud is the environment that combines the two above clouds. Occasionally, people include “multi-cloud” configurations where an organisation takes advantage of multiple public cloud offerings when talking about hybrid clouds.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, we can move on to the misconceptions about cloud computing.
Misconception 1: Cloud computing is more expensive in the long run
While migrating your data to the cloud comes with an upfront cost, cloud computing solutions become cost-effective in the long run. To help achieve cost reduction goals, Google Cloud offers a pay as you go pricing model to allow you the flexibility to manage your costs with no up-front fees or termination charges. Google lets you stay on top of your spending with Recommenders, tools that give you actionable, AI-powered intelligent recommendations and custom dashboards that display cost trends and forecasts. You can access the Google Cloud cost calculator here.
Misconception 2: The cloud is not secure
The misconception that the cloud is not secure is completely understandable. Cloud service providers know that keeping your data secure and compliant is important. Files stored in the cloud are encrypted using complex algorithms to prevent unauthorised access.
Watch this video to learn about Google data centre security:
Misconception 3: The cloud is unreliable
Most cloud service providers offer to deliver 99.9% uptime and if they fail to meet their commitment, you receive a service credit. Luckily, outages are very rare due to redundancy safeguards service providers have implemented.
With all that said, the importance of hiring an experienced team to build and maintain your cloud platform cannot be ignored. Click here to download 5 slides on moving to the cloud or chat with us now to find out how DotModus can help you.
