In this month’s article, we are going to take a look at cloud services and how they can benefit your company.
Each day we hear more and more about “cloud services” and how everything is moving “to the cloud.” It has become an out-of-control buzz phrase. Every software vendor is scrambling to explain how their product is leveraging the cloud. Most of the time it is just marketing fluff with no real meaning. However, deep down underneath all of the filler, there is an amazing technology that can be a true benefit to businesses.
Let’s start at the beginning. What is a cloud service? Unfortunately, there is no official definition. The basic gist of it is that a cloud service is any service you do not host on servers in your own location. For example, I use Gmail for my personal email account. I don’t run the servers myself. In fact, I don’t even know where the physical servers are. They are off in some far-away data center completely managed and operated by Google. I do not need special software on my computer to access it either. I just need to fire up a web browser, point it at Google’s mysterious servers and up pops my email. That is a cloud service. I don’t host it, manage it, maintain it or even back it up. The service is entirely controlled by a (hopefully) trusted third party.
Now, why would you want to trust someone else with your data? Let’s stick with my email example. For my personal email, I don’t want to spend the money to purchase my own mail servers. I also don’t have the time to maintain and update them if I did. I definitely don’t want to purchase redundant internet connections for my home, as well as generators and UPS units to keep the server running. All of these are expenses I cannot justify. However, Google can. By trusting them with my email, I get the benefit of all of those resources with a much smaller share of the expense, as the cost is spread across all of Google’s customers. This is the primary benefit of any cloud service. You can save a small fortune on infrastructure costs by “outsourcing” your software and hardware platforms.
That is not the only way cloud services can benefit your company. Let me give you an example of a project I am working on right now. Tim and I are owners of an Internet startup named EdutainmentLIVE! I know what you are thinking, “Owning an Internet startup today is like having a talk show in the 80s. Who didn’t?” That in itself is an article for another month, but it’ll serve as a great example here. Our company needs to stream live and recorded video to subscribers. Right now, in the development stages, we only have a handful of people in the system at any given time. As a result, we only require three servers to power the whole solution. However, when we have our grand opening, our user base will (hopefully) grow massively in a very short period of time. If our product turns out to be very popular, we could need hundreds or even thousands of servers very quickly. Explosive growth is a hallmark of a successful startup. One month, no one had heard of Pinterest. The next month, they had more than 10 million users. How does a startup get the hardware to support that many users that fast? The answer is: they don’t. Instead, startups like ours rely on cloud service vendors like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
AWS and Azure allow you to dynamically add and remove servers when you need them. Instead of having to purchase 1,000 servers today in anticipation of a need later, you can wait until the last minute and spin up all of the servers you need. For example, Pinterest’s 10 million users are not logged in all at the same time. In fact, during weekday work hours, usage is pretty low. However, in the evenings and on weekends, their usage skyrockets. With AWS you can setup a group of servers to run 24/7. Then, when utilization picks up, they can clone the servers. They add more servers as needed to handle the load. So on the weekend they might have 200 servers running, but come Monday morning they only have 30 servers running. If they had purchased 200 physical servers, then most of them would be sitting idle on Monday. The best part is it can all be done automatically. It is an amazing solution and definitely worth researching if you have a company that fits that model. And you definitely won’t be alone. Companies like Pinterest, Reddit, Netflix and Foursquare all started the same way.
Tim Broom is a local business operator of New Horizons Computer Learning Centers and technology enthusiast. Operating other New Horizons locations in Pensacola, Fla; Birmingham, La.; Charlotte, N.C., he is also the president of Mary Mae Financial, providing tuition financing for more than 50 New Horizons locations. Tim is also the principle at EduTainmentLIVE, an education and entertainment streaming network.