Cloud scalability became one of the main triggers for the big surge in popularity of cloud technologies amongst small and mid-sized enterprises. The ability to respond quickly to the increasing or decreasing market demand is what won many businesses over to give cloud-hosted services a go and discover the true benefits for themselves.
What is cloud scalability?
When we speak of cloud scalability, we mean the capability of the cloud to allow customers to scale their data storage capacities, the processing powers of their IT service, and networking functionality. Cloud customers are typically not required any technical or practical knowledge to scale their operations. Scaling is done fully on the back end by the cloud provider, in little or no time. It should also result in no service disruptions, allowing users to operate as normal. Back in the day, scaling of on-premises technology required weeks and months of strict work, combined with a lot of substantial investments. With the scalability capabilities of the cloud today, this can all be done within days, if not hours.
How can the cloud be scalable?
The explanation of how cloud scalability works is rather simple. It all comes down to the advancements in virtualization technologies. Hereby, we could coin the term virtual machines, also known as VMs, which are practically an imitation of traditional dedicated hardware machines use to power operating computing systems. Nowadays, VMs are simply installed on software, running on the cloud servers of the provider. They require no physical space or resources by cloud customers and they are fully managed by the third-party provider, such as we-IT.
Virtual machines are basically so flexible to work with that they enable cloud scalability to happen overnight. IT specialists can move them between servers (bigger or smaller) easily and allow scaling of the workloads and the resources used by cloud desktop customers. Applications can also be moved to VMs with larger capacity in order to facilitate scaling of the software resources used by the client.
What are the benefits?
Cloud scalability has many benefits that drive cloud migration and choosing to use cloud-hosted services like DaaS.
Cost effectiveness
It is no secret that cloud scalability attracts customers with the affordability tag presented to the customer. In the past, businesses had to make substantial investments to purchase their own in-house virtualization infrastructure and to keep teams of specialists round the clock to maintain it up to standard. Companies also had to set aside a sizeable budget every few years to upkeep their infrastructure and remove obsolete one. Nowadays, this is all done upon request to the cloud provider and requires a small additional charge. Whether it is increasing or decreasing the power capacity of the cloud or the storage space, cloud providers should be able to give the customer a quote and implement within days, the latest.
Business agility
As businesses grow, so do their needs and demands from third-party companies. This is where cloud scalability enables business agility and opens new frontiers to enterprises for new opportunities by offering better and faster performing IT systems at their convenience. One of the greatest benefits of cloud scalability is having the freedom to grow and upscale operations, when the business client is only just getting their foot in the door and they have a lot of promising potential lying ahead.
Disaster recovery
Last but not least comes the benefit of using the extra features of the cloud that come at no extra cost. Typically, companies would need to pay more to IT companies to outsource their disaster recovery plans. Now, this can all be done with the help of the scalable cloud resources which are built to securely store data, regardless of the size that’s needed.
How do you know what is the optimal cloud scalability for your business?
Increasing or decreasing demands of customers goes hand in hand with adjusting the parameters of the cloud solutions based on the cloud scalability capabilities of the provider. In order to determine what changes are required in terms of storage, processing power or else, performance testing should be carried out and different factors should be measured and evaluated. Depending on the amounts of user requests, processing times, memory usage needs and other criteria, your cloud provider should be able to give you an estimate, set new goals and proceed to implementation.
Final words
Cloud scalability is one of the most significant benefits of the cloud computing technology itself. It gives businesses of all sizes the change to grow by boosting their performance capabilities and giving them the competitive edge they deserve.
To find out how cloud scalability can help your business, get in touch with our resourceful team, and we will get back to you shortly!
