At this point in time, some of us driven by curiosity and free trials, some others in search of innovative ways of doing things, the fact is that most of us have tried some flavor of cloud and have subscribed to certain cloud services. And probably, some of you are feeling like when the DVD came out. Looking at your brand new DVD player sitting in your living room you thought: “Well, now I need movies.”
Finding new movies is a matter of thinking of new workloads that could take advantage of the cloud in the context of your business issues. To start with, good candidates are new services that are resource-consuming and that are used temporarily to support our production services. You can think of cloud next time you are in the following situations:
- The development team is recruited but on hold waiting for the servers to be installed and configured: The cloud model provides quick access to the development infrastructure or platforms, allowing projects to start on time. Also, prompt access to standardized test environments contributes to a better quality of software. In addition, it can save money because development environments can be deprovisioned when the project is finished. And, finally, shortened development cycles result in a faster time to market.
- We have to launch a marketing campaign for our new product next week but the existing infrastructure might not be able to cope with the new visits: The demand pattern of marketing or informative web pages is usually variable and not always easy to predict. The elasticity provided by cloud computing allows to dynamically adjust the infrastructure to respond to peaks and troughs and pay only for the infrastructure that is needed at any time.
- The new project requires a platform to collaborate and exchange information with some business partners but we don’t have spare capacity in our data center, also, granting access to visitors would be an issue because of our security policy. A cloud platform based on data centers around the globe that is accessible over the Internet can be an interesting option to enable collaboration among enterprises and individuals from various locations.
- We have to deliver a course next week and there are no servers available: Instead of buying a server for a process that runs only a few times in a month, you could take advantage of the flexibility provided by the cloud and use the resources only when they are required.
- The risk analysis process runs every night but sometimes it cannot complete in the allocated time window because there aren’t enough free computing resources: Finding resources to run processes such as business intelligence or big data analytics, which require significant computing resources during certain periods of time, is sometimes a challenge. Using the elastic resources of the cloud to run these processes allows obtaining meaningful information for making decisions in a shorter time window and without having to make a heavy investment in infrastructure.
These are just some suggestions of types of workloads that could allow you to realize the benefits of the cloud delivery model; for sure you might have thought of many others and I would be glad to hear about them.
