What Is Flexibility in Cloud Computing?
One of the main reasons why individuals, businesses, and organizations around the world embrace cloud computing is its flexibility. Cloud computing can deliver the computing resources you need when you need them. Read on to find out what is flexibility in cloud computing.
Defining Flexibility in Cloud Computing
Imagine that your business is growing fast and needs more storage space for customer-related data. And that it needs to deploy a specific office app to improve your team’s productivity.
Before the emergence of cloud computing, your only option was to invest money into buying more hardware for your data storage center. And to create your own productivity app or buy a ready-made one and install it on every computer in your office.
In both cases, it would have taken you time and required a serious investment. The choice of hardware, comparison of software products and their deployment, and possibly hiring additional IT staff—all of these would have required your attention.
Today, you don’t have to do any of that. Today, you can buy computing resources as well as apps over the internet when you need them. Your whole team can then access them through web apps.
You can get extra TBs of storage space on Dropbox or Google Drive with a click. And you can get your whole team Google Apps for productivity that you don’t have to install on every computer in your office. That’s the flexibility of cloud computing in action.
Flexibility in Cloud Computing – Why
Cloud computing enables greater flexibility in the use of computing resources in several ways. Let’s take a closer look at each of them.
You Can Choose the Delivery Model
Cloud computing lets you choose between buying Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, or Platform as a Service.
You can choose between cloud apps, virtual resources on which to develop your own apps, or whole computing infrastructures for creating computer systems.
You can use cloud computing for private or public use while meeting your specific requirements, budget, and security needs. You don’t have to settle for a one-size-fits-all solution.
You Can Customize and Integrate It with Your Systems
Many cloud computing providers provide APIs and other development tools for customizing cloud services and integrating them with your systems.
This enables you to expand the functionality of your current systems as well as to adapt cloud services to your needs by customizing the features you choose to get.
You Can Scale It According to Your Needs
Scalability and flexibility are not synonymous. Scalability enables you to increase or decrease computing resource allocation as needed. The cloud’s scalability makes it more flexible.
That’s because cloud services enable you to buy the resources you need as you need them. That makes it more cost-effective and energy-efficient than other computing models.
It Increases Mobility
As more and more software interactions occur on mobile devices, having workforce mobility can make your business more productive.
At the same time, it allows employees greater flexibility since they can access data in real-time on their own mobile devices regardless of their location.
The Bottom Line – Flexibility in Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is flexible because it’s adaptable to your needs, available in different models, and scalable. At the same time, it enables an unprecedented level of mobility. At the end of the day, cloud computing is nothing if not flexible.
Additional Cloud Resources
- AWS – Develop, deploy, run, and scale virtually any application on the world’s most reliable, secure, and capable cloud.
- Azure Business Benefits – The Azure cloud platform is more than 200 products and cloud services
- Google Guide – A CIO’s guide to the cloud: hybrid and human solutions to avoid trade-offs
