In this post: explore the topic of cloud’s flexibility and agility in this installment of ADAPTURE’s “Clearing Up the Cloud” series.
You have probably been told in loose terms that “cloud is better” for your business. You have read articles that tout cloud’s ability to “revolutionize your workflow.” Perhaps you have heard ambiguous promises of increased convenience for a smaller price tag. And at the same time, you have most likely dealt with the naysayers who claim that “cloud isn’t safe,” and that it just “puts your data out there for people to hack it.”
As if that’s not conflicting enough, you have probably also noticed that there is a great deal of cloud terminology being thrown around in these conversations—terminology that seems to have a different meaning or purpose depending on who you talk to. Unfortunately for this industry, due to accelerated growth and constant evolution, some terminology has yet to be universally defined. Our goal in this blog series is to not only set the cloud record straight, but to also give you our clear-cut definitions to reference as you consider a migration to public cloud.
Seeing Cloud Benefits Clearly: Flexibility and Agility
It can be hard to see through the cloud, so let’s take a few steps back and gain some clarity. We’ll start with the most fundamental benefits that cloud can offer.
The terms flexibility and agility sound appealing, but they have even more relevance once you understand what they represent within a cloud environment. Although these two words have similar meanings, they have quite different—yet still complementary—connotations within cloud.
Cloud Flexibility Defined
The flexibility offered you through cloud has little to do with bendy-ness. Rather, the very nature of modern cloud architecture eliminates the previous age’s necessity for siloed hardware environments. For example, instead of your company having separate servers for individual computing tasks or applications, cloud offers a single platform that gives you the ability to deploy a spectrum of applications.
At the same time. Inside the same environment.
Once you have migrated to cloud, you are no longer limited to the hardware or software that you have in-house.
According to the cloud experts at ADAPTURE, cloud flexibility “enables the creation, deletion, and modification of virtual servers on an as-needed basis,” depending on what your company requires at a given time. The all-inclusive nature of cloud eliminates the need for you to manage hardware procurement to keep up with your company’s growth and the evolution of your applications.
Yes, this part, at least, is as good as it sounds. And now that we have covered the basics of cloud’s flexibility, let’s discuss cloud agility.
Cloud Agility: We Choose Speed
Cloud’s agility—or speed-to-market—is literally the driving force behind its flexibility. As we mentioned before, the cloud enables a multitude of applications to be run simultaneously within the same environment, but cloud’s agility gives it the speed and efficiency to adapt quickly to the demands of businesses and their market fluctuations. “Ultimately,” Abdalla explains, “agile cloud not only improves operational efficiencies, it also reduces software development and deployment times.”
More specifically, cloud agility grants companies the freedom to spin up or down a virtual server live and on demand. For instance, before cloud, if you wanted to run multiple marketing campaigns at the same time, you would have had to purchase a series of new servers to manage the additional computation requirements. However, once those campaigns were over, you would be left with idle hardware that couldn’t pull its weight until the next round of campaigns.
However, thanks to agile cloud, you now can pay for what virtual server power you need when you need it, and stop paying for it once you don’t.
Again, our goal at ADAPTURE is to combat theoretical haziness and simplify cloud by giving you concrete definitions of its components. We can assure you that cloud flexibility and cloud agility are just two of the many characteristics that translate to added efficiency and success for your company when you operate within a cloud environment.
Click here for the next installment of ADAPTURE’s “Clearing Up the Cloud” series: Computing Scalability.
Done with the basics and ready to see what cloud can do for you? Schedule some time with one of our expert Solutions Architects!
