Harness the Cloud: Critical Benefits of Cloud Computing

Today, IT pros tend to talk about moving to the cloud in the same way your doctor might talk about exercising and eating well: as something that's inherently good and beneficial.

But why, exactly, is the cloud so advantageous? Which specific benefits does it offer? Those details can sometimes fall through the cracks in conversations about cloud computing, which has become so widespread that it's easy to forget why more than 98% of organizations use cloud services as of 2024.

You shouldn't move the cloud just because everyone else is doing it, of course. Instead, you should understand which specific benefits it offers — and what you'll need to do to achieve those benefits — before committing to a cloud-centric strategy.

To that end, this guide walks through the key benefits of the modern cloud, including both technical advantages (like greater reliability) and business advantages (like the potential to save money). The goal is to provide balanced, comprehensive perspective on exactly why the cloud can be so advantageous — while also pointing out the potential drawbacks and gotchas of modern cloud computing.

Related:Our Cloud Storage Provider Went Down. Now I’m Rethinking Our Strategy.

Introduction to Cloud Computing

Let's start by going over the basics of what the cloud is and where it came from.

Understanding Cloud Basics: Public, Private, and Hybrid Models

The cloud is any type of IT architecture that involves the use of remote compute, memory, and storage resources.

That, at least, is how we're going to define cloud for this guide. We should note that exact definitions of cloud computing have changed a bit over time, and that there is still some nuanced debate surrounding what counts as the cloud and what doesn't. For example, some folks would argue that the entire internet is the cloud, whereas others adopt a narrower definition wherein cloud computing refers to platforms that make servers available on-demand over a network. But we'll save those details for another day.

The Evolution of Cloud Technology

By most definitions, cloud computing dates to the late 1990s. That's when companies like Salesforce began making their software available using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, making it possible to access applications without having to install and host them locally. Then, in the mid-2000s, companies such as Amazon began building infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platforms that essentially allowed businesses to "rent" server capability over the internet. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions, which combine software development and deployment services with IaaS platforms, emerged around the same time.

Related:Guide to Cloud Computing ETFs

Since these formative years two decades ago, cloud solutions have continued to evolve in various ways. For example, it's now possible to build complex hybrid cloud architectures that integrate on-premises and cloud-based resources. New types of cloud services, like serverless functions, have also emerged. But the core cloud computing models — SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS — remain essentially the same as they were at the turn of the century.

Unleashing Efficiency and Flexibility

Now, let's discuss which benefits the cloud offers, starting with its potential to add efficiency and flexibility to IT strategies.

Scalability for Growing Business Needs

One way that the cloud enables efficiency and flexibility is by providing access to virtually unlimited IT resources, which allows for unprecedented scalability.

In a non-cloud based environment, the ability of workloads to scale was limited by how many servers were available. And adding new servers was a complicated, expensive, and time-consuming process, so if you ran out of server capacity, you couldn't easily add more.

Related:Microclouds: The Next Big Thing in Cloud Computing or Just Another Edge Strategy?

But in the cloud, where servers are available on-demand, scaling can happen in just seconds. And because most cloud pricing models allow customers to pay as they go, you pay only for the server capacity you consume, instead of having to pay upfront for new servers.

Speed and Productivity in a Competitive Landscape

The scalability of the cloud translates to speed and productivity, too — which can be powerful business advantages.

The cloud makes it easier for businesses to bring products to market or support more customers without worrying that limited IT resources will slow them down. In addition, the fact that cloud resources are accessible from anywhere can help to increase business productivity. In the cloud, work doesn't have to slow down because files or applications are only accessible from a certain location and employees are located elsewhere.

Strategic Advantages in the Market

The cloud has the potential to save significant money, too, another key business advantage.

Economic Impacts: Cost Savings and ROI

The main economic advantage of the cloud is that businesses usually only pay for the cloud resources they actually use. As a result, they don't have to make large upfront investments in IT infrastructure that they may or may not end up needing fully.

That said, there are many potential ways to waste money in the cloud, too. It's important to monitor and optimize cloud costs in order to capitalize fully on the cloud's economic benefits and maximize cloud ROI.

Innovating with Advanced Cloud Capabilities

In some cases, the cloud can help enable more cost-effective innovation.

For example, building and deploying a large language model (LLM) to take advantage of generative AI is a complex endeavor that requires very specialized expertise, as well as expensive infrastructure. But by using a cloud-based LLM developed by an external vendor — such as the LLMs behind ChatGPT or Google Gemini — businesses can benefit from genAI without the cost and complexity of implementing their own solution.

Enabling Remote Workforce Empowerment

Because cloud resources are available from anywhere with an internet connection, the cloud is a great way to enable remote work.

Accessibility Anywhere: The Global Office

When you host business productivity applications and data in the cloud, employees can access them from home, or on work trips, just as easily as they can from the office.

Going even further, solutions like desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) make it possible to replace conventional desktop computers entirely with cloud-based virtual machines, meaning that even operating systems and interfaces are hosted in the cloud.

Collaboration Tools That Redefine Teamwork

The ability to connect from anywhere also helps enable collaboration. When data and applications live in the cloud, multiple employees can use and collaborate on them in real time, even if workers are spread across diverse locations.

The cloud makes it possible to say goodbye to hassles like having to share multiple copies of Word documents via email, or being unable to make progress on a project because the files are stored on someone else's computer and that person is taking the day off.

Security and Reliability in the Digital Age

From the perspective of security, reliability, and data protection, the cloud offers important benefits, too.

Centralized Data Protection Strategies

Cloud platforms can, and sometimes do, go down. But most clouds have a stronger track record of maximizing uptime than on-prem environments, which are not always as well-designed or -managed.

In addition, by centralizing data in one location, the cloud makes it easier to implement comprehensive backup and recovery strategies. Modern backup tools even make it possible to do things like restore workloads from one cloud into an environment hosted on a different cloud. This is a benefit in scenarios where one cloud goes down and businesses want to bring their workloads up again without waiting for the failed cloud to come back online.

Building Resilient Systems for Business Continuity

More generally, the cloud enables resilience, which translates to higher rates of business continuity.

Again, it would be wrong to assume that the cloud will never fail. But on the whole, the cloud is less likely to fail. In addition, options like the ability to configure multiple availability zones (which creates redundant copies of data and applications) reduce the risk of downtime even more when you use the cloud.

Driving Environmental Sustainability

Globally, data centers, including those that power the cloud, consume about 1% of total energy — a pretty significant figure. However, there is a strong case to be made that, in general, the cloud is more sustainable than relying on on-prem infrastructure.

The Green Benefits of Cloud Operations

Much of the reason why the cloud can be greener boils down to economies of scale. When thousands of companies run workloads in the same data center using shared infrastructure, energy can be used more efficiently than it could if each business ran its own set of servers.

In addition, cloud providers tend to have strong purchasing power on the energy market. This helps them source renewable or clean energy sources in volumes and at rates that might be harder for smaller businesses to achieve. Most companies can't afford to build their own wind farms, for example, but the cloud hyperscalers can.

Optimizing Resource Usage Through Cloud Solutions

The cloud can also prove more sustainable in the respect that it enables more efficient use of IT resources. The ability to consume only what you need when you need it may translate to lower energy consumption than having to deploy servers that might sit idle much of the time (but are still consuming power) because you purchased more server capacity than you require.

The Future Outlook of Cloud Computing

Although the cloud is a very well-established IT model at this point, it continues to evolve in certain ways.

Emerging Trends in Cloud Technology Adoption

Among the emerging cloud trends to watch are edge computing, which moves parts of workloads from centralized cloud data centers to the network "edge" to improve performance. AI is also having a major impact on cloud computing, due in no small part to the increased demand for cloud resources that AI has created.

Preparing for a Cloud-Dominant Era

The cloud era is already here. But in the years to come, it's likely that the cloud will become even more dominant.

This doesn't mean that on-prem environments will disappear entirely. There will likely always be some reasons to deploy certain types of workloads on-prem. For instance, because local networks are still so much faster than the internet, on-prem computing can be a better option when dealing with workloads that need to move a lot of data over the network.

But in general, most organizations should expect the cloud to be at the center of IT innovation for the years and decades to come — and they will likely find themselves using the cloud as the "default" solution for hosting workloads. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) About Cloud Computing

What Are the Different Types of Cloud Services Available?

At a high level, there are three main types of cloud services:

Within each of these categories, there are several types of specific cloud services, which can vary across cloud platforms. For example, in the realm of IaaS, there are both virtual machines (available through services like Amazon EC2) and serverless functions (available from AWS Lambda). Each type of service reflects a different style of IaaS.

How Do Businesses Achieve Cost Savings with Cloud Computing?

Cloud cost management and optimization is a complicated topic, but the fundamentals boil down to ensuring that you're not paying for cloud resources you don't need.

Key practices to this end include rightsizing cloud workloads so that you allocate only the level of CPU, memory, and storage they require, as well as looking for idle or unused cloud resources and shutting them down to save money.

What Security Measures Are Essential for Cloud Environments?

Cloud security is a complex domain. But to summarize, key security practices and areas of concern include: