Businesses are accessing new avenues and higher levels of productivity through cloud computing. How will this technology develop in 2023?
For more than a decade, people have been talking about the cloud, and how cloud computing is changing the way individuals work and businesses operate. This is completely true – cloud computing has been a major paradigm shift in the professional world; but is that change beginning to slow down? Not at all. We spoke with a number of B2B tech companies about how the cloud has changed business in their perspective. For example, one company we spoke to which provides IT support Law Firms rely on, pointed out that cloud computing has made compliance management much easier for many of their clients. Let’s look at some of the ways that cloud services has impacted business, and how it is predicted to develop moving forward…
What are Cloud Services?
The flexibility and potential of cloud computing has led to it being used to host and deliver various services to the end user remotely. Traditionally, businesses would need to host any apps on servers in their office to be able to deliver them to users over a network – with the cloud, premises of any kind are no longer necessary. Below are some examples of cloud services that have been especially popular over the last decade:
Platform as a Service
Cloud apps (i.e. apps that are accessed over a network, instead of from a local device) have become hugely popular, but not all apps are available this way. This is why Platform as a Service is yet another popular cloud service. This service gives businesses access to a proprietary, pre-build cloud platform that can be used to host applications. Some well-known PaaS examples include Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. The benefit of this type of platform is that it gives businesses much more flexibility around what apps and services they can host and deploy from the cloud. One of the companies that spoke to us, who provide business IT support London companies use, stated that PaaS has helped pave the way to making remote IT support viable for many more organisations, because businesses are relying less and less on their on-premise IT infrastructure.
Infrastructure as a Service
Some businesses want to have complete granular control over their cloud infrastructure; and if they do not have the time or resources to build their own cloud, they use Infrastructure as a Service, instead. IaaS is probably the most popular type of public service among businesses. Organisations simply pay to access the cloud infrastructure of a public provider (like Microsoft Azure or AWS); from there, they are able to use the underlying infrastructure to build their entire cloud environment from scratch.
Software as a Service
Businesses have been relying on software for a long time, but traditionally their software would have been installed on computers and servers. With Software as a Service, apps are hosted in a cloud environment; more specifically, the developer of the app hosts it in their proprietary cloud, and customers pay monthly to access the app in their cloud. Some common examples of this are Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft 365. An IT company we spoke to that provides Microsoft 365 consulting services pointed to the service as a prime example of business SaaS solutions. Microsoft have been progressively transforming all of their products to be available through an SaaS model.
How Are Cloud Services Evolving in Business?
It is plain that cloud services are largely taking over in the business world; they are by far the easiest way for businesses (especially smaller businesses with less money) to access the right solutions for success. But how are cloud services likely to develop in the future? One example is the rise of Industry Cloud Platforms – this are platforms that combine all of the services mentioned above into a single agile platform that businesses can use to manage workloads in a more efficient and streamlined way.
