Cloud services are gaining momentum. According to Gartner, this market will grow by 17.5% and reach $214.3 billion in the U.S. in 2020. For many small firms, it is a much cheaper and beneficial option than deploying a full-fledged IT infrastructure. And startups, thanks to cloud technologies, have the opportunity to quickly scale their business, saving on the purchase of their own servers. But how to choose a cloud solution that suits you most? Here's what you need to pay attention to.
It is difficult to overestimate the cloud solutions convenience for modern business. It is relatively inexpensive, convenient, and does not require a staff of IT-specialists (not everyone can afford it). In addition, such technologies are perfectly suited for companies working without an office or with a distributed team, as employees working in the cloud system are more agile.
IaaS or SaaS
The choice of platform directly depends on the business needs. Some are satisfied with the functionality provided by SaaS (Software as a Service), others require the ability to "fit" functionality to the needs of the company. In the second case, the platform IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is more suitable since it can be modified to fit your needs. Large companies use IaaS services more often, while the SMB market representatives prefer to sell simple ready-made boxed SaaS solutions.
Most of the solutions in the industry are oriented to the mass market. However, small b2b companies also have a credit. When choosing the most suitable cloud service, an enterprise in the SMB segment has two ways. The first one is to purchase a classic cloud IaaS and further customize any solutions, transforming it into SaaS for company users. The second way is to purchase a ready-made SaaS solution. The first option is more suitable for corporations that have a staff of IT-specialists. In turn, small companies often have only one IT-specialist at their disposal, and in this case it is better to study the second option.
Solution Choice and Cost
"Cloudiness" implies the possibility of providing resources with a high guarantee of their availability. In other words, if hardware resources on physical computers fail or shut down, the cloud can continue to function (in some cases, without significant loss of efficiency), or even automatically restore a working state (self-healing).
In case you need to choose a cloud provider, below it is an option of how you can start your acquaintance. It is suitable for purpose, from an ordinary developer request to maintain the whole IT infrastructure.
Serverspace
Pretty budget option among the other cloud providers, although it is worth forgetting about the price, when stability determines how the machine brings money. Serverspace offers a minimal but sufficient toolkit to fully automate resource management. Average time to create and run a new virtual machine is no more than one minute.
In addition, Serverspace provides an opportunity to create "snapshots" and backup your servers (right now, this service is free). With the snapshot feature, you can capture the state of the virtual machine any time you wish. Moreover, you can restore the machine to this state later. It is a relatively fast process, unlike starting a new machine. The Snapshot can be sent to another user to set up virtual machines "turnkey".
Additionally, there is a large knowledge base for Serverspace users, which includes typical recipes for configuring virtual machines for specific needs and software.
You can get the internal IP address for the virtual machine in American data centers. The exchange rate on the internal grid reaches 1Gbps, which allows, for example, to form cluster structures from virtual machines.
The main advantage I’ve noticed for myself is that you can easily move your company's IT infrastructure, corporate email, CRM systems, accounting data and much more to a secure cloud.
Also, an API will soon be available, which will allow you to fully automate all activities with virtual machines. Moreover, everything that is available from the interface in a browser is accessible through the API too. Watch for platform updates to receive all the useful information first. The company is new to the U.S. market, but has long been working in other countries and managed to capture its users and good reviews.
Conclusion
Cloud services are no longer something fundamentally new in the Information Technology industry. Gone are the days when the guys from Dropbox literally on their knees created revolutionary solutions based on Cloud. Today, this is an absolutely natural solution in the field of optimizing the work processes of IT (and not only) companies.
The Cloud market has reached such a size that developers and entrepreneurs can now choose from a large number of infrastructures and applications that aim to achieve maximum optimization. In our article, I tried to tell you what is the fundamental difference between the main types of Cloud services and how to come to the most correct decision.
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