What are the Advantages of adopting public cloud?

Public cloud can be stated as a stand-alone, or proprietary, an off-premise model that is run by third-party companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, and others. Public Cloud Computing is generally a mix of applications from anonymous consumers on shared infrastructure. 

Public Cloud as a Strategic Business Decision

Public cloud uses Internet-based technologies to deliver dynamically provisioned, standardized business processes, applications and infrastructure services, and resources. 

Public cloud is typically managed by an off-site, third-party provider to any business. Some of the renowned public cloud examples are Google Apps, iPhone apps, and Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). IBM has united with Amazon to enable software developers that quickly build pre-production applications based on IBM software within the Amazon EC2 environment.

With time and experience, enterprises and cloud service providers have become accustomed to the architectural model and have gained substantial confidence in delivering the security and access-control technologies available. As a result, we now see public cloud service providers offering services as a third party in a much seamless and effective way.

What people understand by 'Public' is freely accessible, which is not completely correct. You can say the public cloud has some features free and others less expensive to use than the other cloud platforms. 

Moreover, the public does not mean the data is open for all to view. The public cloud offers elasticity and cost-effectiveness to deploy solutions, but for entire data transparency or accessibility, it all depends on the user. The third-party service provider offers an access control mechanism to those who want to keep their data hidden. 

The reason why SMEs are inclined towards the public cloud is it gives you the flexibility to pay as you go. This model is the most attractive as it is cost-effective, where all customers share the same infrastructure but with limited configuration, yet with security protection and availability variance. 

Cloud Computing supports interactive and user-friendly web applications and dynamic software development. Be it private or public, the cloud has an important role in innovatively scaling business. The public cloud has the new and improved capabilities of cloud computing that a conventional IT solution cannot proffer. Along with minimum infrastructure and resources, there are various other benefits of integrating the Public cloud within your organization.

Benefits of Adopting Public Cloud In Your Business

Flexibility 

In order to enhance flexibility within the business processes, many companies have chosen the adoption of cloud computing. Not just in-house, the cloud offers an employee to freely travel or work remotely while accessing the data via the Internet through any device. This helps the organization to better handle demands, allow sharing of the documents and files, keeping every employee updated on the processes of activity, & many more. The identical documents issue can also be resolved with the cloud as it allows employees to access and update the data at regular intervals as per their requirement. 

Cost-Reduction

Another advantage of cloud computing is a reduction in the exorbitant prices paid by the organization for resources and infrastructure. With the help of in-house provisions of the services, the cloud makes the business processes easy and cost-effective. Cloud asks to pay money for the services that you use when accessing cloud services instead of whole. The cost-effective feature of the cloud encouraged 45.5% of organizations to adopt the services saving them from huge monthly or yearly subscription plans. The cloud resources like SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS can be installed and deployed quickly.

Cloud Service providers are the key to managing, patching, and upgrading cloud as well as maintaining the services. By engaging service providers, you can easily reduce the cost and burden of hiring IT staff to manage them.

Regular and Automatic Upgrades

Maintaining and upgrading the current software and hardware was a back-breaking and arduous job until the cloud emerged. The huge cost was the reason behind most companies' negligence in upgrading their hardware and software, which lead to a negative impact. 

After the rise and progression of cloud computing, companies were free from the exorbitant prices, also able to build better relationships while constantly remaining in technological advances, enhance profit, provide standardized services to the customer at a very low price. 

Further, reduced cost and improved efficiency encouraged companies to engage in automatic processes by buying Supply Chain Management and Customer Relationship Management applications. Today, most of the companies are leveraging these automated applications to ease and pace up the work concerning the demand. 

Agile Management 

In order to match the competitive world, businesses are forced to speed up their business processes and development. Highlighting the ways to make your organization different from others will help the organization to respond to the customer's fast-changing needs. And cloud computing has also excelled at this level by providing the organizations with the ability to reach out to customer's needs in a more effective manner. Thanks to the Internet, the cloud is around us 24 hours, 365 days. The three types where cloud computing can increase agility are -

• System Infrastructure - for machines and spare part maintenances
• Backup Policy - for backup management 
• Single Application - for software management (upgrades or application support)

Compared with cloud servers, it just takes minutes for cloud computing to procure and provision.

Scalability

One of the major benefits of adopting Cloud computing over IT solutions or cloud servers is scalability, which allows users to adjust the resources based on changes in business needs. Like the aforementioned, the cloud is interactive, businesses can expand the computing infrastructure, unlike the IT solutions that are inconvenient to upgrade with changing needs.

Through the scalability feature of the cloud, a business can focus on solving key problems in less time and increase customer satisfaction. 

Cloud computing suggests or makes resources quickly available, which reduces the capacity planning needs. Moreover, cloud computing allows its users to analyze immense data in just a few minutes, which is an added advantage for even small organizations, allowing them to analyze the market and predict customers, their behavior, and buying habits.

Addressing the Security Concern of Public Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing emergence promises far-reaching effects on the systems and networks of the organization. The features that make cloud computing so exciting and fascinating can become quickly vulnerable to threats as they follow the conventional security models and controls. Public cloud computing needs to consider involving robust security and privacy systems.

Organizations, before engaging in a cloud computing solution, must analyze whether the service provider can meet the security, privacy, and other requirements or not. 

Security and privacy are the primary concern for any government or private organization. Since different organizations have different levels of data privacy and security objectives, thus the perspective of each organization must be clarified before instigating cloud solutions. 

Service Level Agreements 

The specifications of public cloud service and its arrangements are defined within the SLA. It also notifies the period of the service, conditions of termination, and disposition of data upon termination. The multi-documented SLA typically consists of an understanding of the policy, acceptance of use, terms of use, compensation of the failure of expected and specified level of services to the cloud customer, which is agreed by the organization and the service provider respectively.

You can either go for the non-negotiable agreement, where the provider can make modifications to the terms of services without directly notifying the consumer. Or rest on negotiated service agreements, which is more like a traditional contract that addresses the organization's concerns about security, privacy policy, procedures, and technical controls.

Upsides of Security and Privacy 

The Cloud Computing paradigm offers opportunities for innovation in provisioning security and privacy services for improving the overall security of the organization. However, those that will benefit are likely to be small organizations due to limited data for concern. 

Today, privacy has broader implications concerning organizational, operational, and technical. Other aspects of privacy can be confidentiality, integrity, and availability objectives of security. 

The potential areas where organizations can derive security and privacy benefits from transitioning into public cloud computing are -

Staff Specialization - Cloud Service providers can train staff of the large organization to specialize in security, privacy, and other respective areas of concern. Through such an opportunity, staff members can take remedial actions, make improvements to security and privacy more readily.

Platform Strength - The structure is typically uniform of any cloud computing platforms, which allows greater uniformity. The homogeneity facilitates better automation of security management activities such as configuration controls, vulnerability testing, security audits, and security patching of components. Cloud Computing environments meet standards for operational compliance and certifications for imparting a level of assurance and acceptance criteria. 

Resource Availability - The scalability of the public cloud offers greater availability, redundancy, and disaster recovery capabilities for better resilience. Greater availability can support privacy by letting individuals access correct records. On-demand resource capacity can also better resilience when faced with increased service demands or distributed denial of services, and quicker recovery from serious incidents.

Backup and Recovery - The policies and procedures of cloud providers allow better availability, faster restoration, more reliable circumstances, and off-site backup storage and geographical compliance requirements. Cloud Service provider also provisions an off-site repository for an organization's data center for backup and recovery.

Mobile Endpoints - Cloud clients can either have general web browsers or have special applications thus, the cloud solution extends to client architecture, which can be used to access hosted applications. Cloud Clients are meant to generally have a lightweight computation that supports all kinds of devices, benefiting the productivity of the mobile workforce.

Data Concentration - For smaller and mobile devices, the public cloud may be of lesser risk to data than the data being dispersed on large computers, removable media out in the field. Organizations are following their own transition to support access to data from mobile to improve workflow management and gain operational efficiencies and productivity benefits.  

Migrating To Public Cloud Environment

Public Cloud Computing is a model for enabling resource allocation to dynamic business workloads in a real-time and cost-effective manner. Offering resources are a cost-effective price, and dealing with security concerns shouldn't be the only criterion when determining business workloads. Migrating to a public cloud environment requires validation of the business applications and workloads in terms of technical portability and business compliance in order to deploy them without any complex customization.

Cloud Decision Support System - An Effective Approach to Migrate Workloads & Processes

The Cloud Decision Support System is an approach to help the higher management authorities and teams to automate processes and identify workloads to move to the public cloud environment cost-effectively.

The CDSS approach automates the classification and categorization of workloads into different categories, such as business-critical (BC) and non-business critical (NBC) workloads to identify based on business services within the overall business function. 

This approach also helps in assessing the public cloud providers based on features and constraints. Moreover, CDSS provides consideration for industry compliance/requirements and the price model for hosting the workloads on a pay-per-use basis.

Best Fit - Analytical Tool

The analytical tool, Best Fit, is designed to find the best cloud provider that fits your business needs and hosting business service workloads. Cloud Decision Support System - An effective way to migrate workloads & processes. 

The best Fit tool is connected to the Cloud Decision Support System and offers a solution based on the analysis outcomes of the CDSS approach.

Conclusion -

Public cloud computing is the most convenient choice, especially when the organization has SaaS applications from the provider with a robust security strategy for incremental capacity and standardized workloads for used apps. Other than that, the public cloud offers flexibility, reduces cost, automates hardware and software upgrades, brings agility and scalability to the business.

With the help of a reliable and trustworthy cloud provider, you can secure your data on cloud architecture. Even though you must have a written SLA regarding access to control, risk management, system backup, and recovery from your cloud provider. 

Businesses can reduce their workload identification, classification before engaging and migrating into a cloud environment. With the automated approach, CDSS can accelerate the processes, reduce cost and time when deciding to move through an effective, informed, and fact-based decision process.