Have you ever wondered where are your emails stored? or how you can effortlessly switch mobiles and all your backed up data is transferred so smoothly? or what does it really mean by backed up data itself?
Even though you may not know it, but almost all of us are using the cloud in one way or another. If you have a Google or an Apple account, use Gmail, backup WhatsApp data, you are already on the cloud. Cloud Computing is such an essential part of our lives, that today without the cloud, we cannot make a search on Google, or shop on Amazon, or even use Skype.
Today, in this post, I am going to talk about cloud computing, and how is it being used by developers and engineers. So let us start.
“Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. ~ Wikipedia”
Cloud Providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure Cloud, and many others, provide many different resources and services such as storage, computing, database, etc to users on an as-needed based. For example, suppose you have a Google Account, then you will already be registered on the Google One platform, which provides you with 15 GB of free space. This space is consumed by the mails we receive, the images and videos we back up, the media stored in the drive, the app data of different apps we use, and many others. Google also provides a cloud identity service, which we use whenever we sign in on a platform with Google. And not only Google, but Microsoft (Yahoo), and many other cloud providers, also provide similar services.
I hope you can imagine the scope of services that are provided to us by the cloud. These services are not limited to just general purpose use, these are provided to companies and organizations that use the cloud for various purposes including computing, database, storage, analytics, security, identity, and so many others.
Photo by Ian Battaglia on Unsplash
Cloud Services in Industries
Today, cloud computing is being used in almost every enterprise of any scale in every industry. Especially, it has a lot of advantages to small enterprises since, its setup is very quick, easy, and cost-effective. Without cloud computing, if you want to create and host your website, you will need to purchase your own physical server, use its storage, create and manage a database, manage the loads, and do a lot more work. But using cloud services, depending on the type of industry and use case, we don’t need any physical setup. We just need to register on a cloud-providing platforms, such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, and purchase different services as our need, like storage, database, computing, etc. and deploy our application. That’s all you need to do.
Let us now have a look at how the cloud is being utilized in different industries.
Education
Educational Institutes have adopted many cloud solutions to provide various services to both, the students and faculty. They store their huge student and faculty records on the cloud for complete safety and security. They use cloud platforms in order to stream live videos, conduct virtual meetings, and even upload assignments. There has been significant growth in cloud usage since the COVID 19 because due to lockdowns, physical classes were no longer being conducted. Hence the migration to the cloud for most of the tasks became very essential.
Finance
Since, in finance industries, there are a lot of data that needs to be stored or processed, or analyzed. Storing so much data on one local server can be very risky since, in case it crashes, there will be a huge loss faced by the organization, and if backups are created, it will be very costly to manage them. Hence using the cloud in order to store these data, was a very beneficial option as it provides very high security to your data. Another part was implementing artificial intelligence in capital markets. These AI programs could need very specific server configurations to be optimized and needed to be secure and fast. So hosting these models on the cloud was another great advantage for the industry.
Distributors and Retail Stores
Most of the distributors or retailers already use the cloud as accounting software and stock management systems. There can be a possibility that they can use CRM(Customer relationship management) software or probably eCommerce platforms. Many suppliers have recently started implementing affiliate marketing to their products, and it can be very beneficial for them if they implement these systems overcloud.
Healthcare
The healthcare industry puts requires a lot of patient safety and privacy. Many cloud providers provide HIPAA compliance to ensure proper treatment of patient information. Diagnosis Systems are also popularly being implemented in cloud. These implement artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to make medical diagnoses and recommend treatments.
IT Industries
Obviously, there is a huge implementation of the cloud in IT industries, as it is the backbone of many enterprises. Most IT solutions are cloud-based, such as all modern SaaS(Software as a Service) implementations are cloud-based. The outbreak of serverless architecture is also becoming a popular cloud feature. There can be an endless list of cloud implementations in IT industry.
Cloud Providers
Now let us have a brief introduction of the three major cloud providers: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
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.~ Wikipedia”
AWS today has a market share in the cloud vendors of about 32% which is the highest among the vendors, and more than the combined market share of GCP and Azure.
It conducts many events throughout the year. You can view and attend these events over here.
Google Cloud
“ Google Cloud Platform ( GCP ), 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.~Wikipedia”
GCP has a market share of around 7% and has shown a growth rate of more than 45% in 2021. It also conducts a few events which you can view over here.
Microsoft Azure
“Microsoft Azure , often referred to as Azure, is a cloud computing service operated by Microsoft for application management via Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and supports many different programming languages, tools, and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.~Wikipedia”
Azure has a market share of around 19% and has shown the highest growth rate of around 50% in the year 2021.
Azure conducts many events, conferences, and webinars. You can register or view them here.
Conclusion
Cloud is not a new conception, it has been active for a long time, although, it has been diversifying in a lot of industries and can be very beneficial for certain tasks. Like in case you want to experiment with starting your own website or SaaS, or maybe want to try to implement some IT solutions in your industry, it can be a great starting point.
To know more about the topic, just follow up with the post, and I will keep adding different posts related to computer science concepts, and try to keep them from a very fundamental point of view.
I hope that you enjoyed reading this post. If you would want me to create a post on any different topic, let me know in the comments section.
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