Jeremy Wanamaker | Sep 13, 2023
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The changes that cloud computing has precipitated in the business world are hard to comprehend. In the two decades since Amazon’s AWS platform first pioneered the concept, companies of all shapes and sizes have emerged to leverage the cloud’s potential to harness innovation, reshape traditional business practices, and forge new frontiers of exploration.
| “In a world where innovation is the currency of success, cloud computing has emerged as the linchpin of business transformation.” ~Jeremy Wanamaker, CEO of Complete Network |
While the concept of the cloud is simple, it continues to play a disruptive role and shape the way that business is conducted, so much so that any organization that’s not currently using it to drive transformational change of core operations risks becoming irrelevant.
Today, the cloud represents a similar wave of change, forcing businesses to adapt swiftly to survive and thrive.
In our increasingly competitive and interconnected digital society, innovation is the chasm separating winners from losers.
Given the blinding pace of change, your legacy technologies limit your capacity to keep up. If IT procurement, installation, and deployment are measured in terms of weeks or months, how can you rapidly experiment and quickly scale up if a project gains attraction? The short answer is you can’t.
The cloud democratizes innovation. It affords users an unparalleled degree of agility, scalability, elasticity, and speed to market. While it’s not a “magic” potion that cures all ailments, it empowers businesses with new ways to experiment with ideas, improve user experiences, adapt to changing conditions, and reimagine how and why you do business.
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The capacity for cloud systems and applications to quickly expand their data storage, computing, memory, and networking resources to handle varying workloads as needed is scalability. It’s a fundamental aspect of cloud computing and a leading reason why the cloud has blossomed from a niche technology into a business necessity in a relatively short period.
The “secret sauce” enabling cloud scalability can largely be attributed to the principle of virtualization.
With virtual machines, you can expand any network resource, like memory, CPU cycles, or hard drive storage, at a moment’s notice. In addition to vertical scaling that goes up or down, the cloud allows you to scale horizontally by adding new virtual machines (VMs) as needed.
Relocating your IT operations from on-prem to a cloud environment means that your capital expenditures (CapEx) are traded for operational expenditures (OpEx). Here’s what that means, in the simplest terms:
Choosing to shift workloads to the cloud provides several tangible cost savings that help the organization greatly streamline budgeting.
Furthermore, while cloud providers are best known for their pay-as-you-go services, many cloud platforms offer deeper discounts and more favorable service-level agreements to customers who are willing to commit to longer-term agreements.
Anyone familiar with managing networks larger than just a few dozen nodes will be familiar with how quickly the mess of switches, routers, firewalls, servers, and workstations can become overwhelming or descend into a state of chaos.
This situation is a nightmare for network administrators, jolting even the most experienced network admins awake in the dead of night, drenched in cold sweats. Here again, is where cloud solutions come to the rescue by allowing organizations to reduce their network complexity greatly.
For the simplest arrangements, admins need to manage only a single physical infrastructure pipeline that connects the company to the cloud. Then, within the cloud, virtualized network components such as CDNs, subnets, VPC, gateways, DNS, load balancers, VPNs, etc., are all administered via software-defined networking (SDN) architectures.
SDN furnishes a command-and-control center for organizations to provision, connect, and manage complex virtual networks through a single pane of glass, while the cloud provider handles patching, updating, and upkeep of physical network components.
| Discover more about cloud computing than you ever thought possible: |
A shared security agreement with your cloud service provider assists in reducing the weight of IT security responsibilities. Shared security agreements, also called shared responsibility models (SRM), provide clear definitions of security roles between the cloud provider and the customer.
To break it down, the typical SRM puts the onus of tracking and remedying threats against underlying cloud infrastructure and adjacent computing resources on the provider, while cloud customers are responsible for securing who can access data, workloads, configurations, and private networks within the cloud environment.
The different cloud delivery models influence how an SRM is structured:
SRMs will also differ based on your use of public clouds, private clouds, or hybrid clouds.
It’s a well-known fact that technology consumes a lot of energy. Take, for instance, the fact that the Bitcoin network uses 1,449 kWh of power to complete a single transaction. For context, that’s about the same amount of electricity consumed by the average US household for nearly two months!
Driven by government mandates and societal demand to promote sustainability, businesses worldwide are compelled to reexamine their IT operations with the aim of minimizing waste and promoting environmental responsibility.
The cloud has become an unlikely hero in all of this.
Despite having earned a reputation for being energy-greedy, most of today’s data centers operate with remarkable efficiency and are committed to environmental sustainability. A joint study on the environmental benefits of cloud computing found that data centers are up to 93% more energy efficient than on-prem IT operations.
In practical terms, this means that the impact of moving to the cloud reaches far beyond its innovation and financial ramifications since it helps to lessen your environmental footprint, drive organizational sustainability efforts, and increase brand trust.
| Service Model | Control Level | Security Responsibility | Use Case Examples |
| SaaS | Low | Provider | Email, CRM |
| PaaS | Medium | Shared | App Development |
| IaaS | High | User | Virtual Machines |
The Complete Network team has been helping small and midsized businesses build cloud solutions since the very earliest days of the term “cloud computing.”
Over the years, we’ve earned consistent praise and 5-star reviews for our transparency, service quality, and reliability.
Could you use help to formulate a cloud strategy for your business? Contact our team at [email protected] or 844 426 7844 at any time. We’re here to help!
In an ideal world, technology would be a consistent source of competitive advantage and benefit for small and midsized businesses. The reality is that many fail to realize that confidence.
Without the right resources and support, even a highly skilled technology team can become overwhelmed by the growing list of technology management duties. When important tasks get neglected, it creates ripple effects throughout an organization that damage productivity and efficiency.
The co-managed IT services model solves these problems by providing your existing IT team with all the support and resources they need to successfully plan, manage, and defend your network technology.
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