How Cloud use cases?

With 25% of organizations planning to move all their applications to cloud within the next year, it would seem that cloud computing use cases are limitless. But even for companies not planning a wholesale shift to the cloud, certain initiatives and cloud computing are a match made in IT heaven.

[Disaster recoveryand business continuity have always been a natural for cloud because cloud provides cost-effective redundancy to protect data against system failures and the physical distance required to recover data and applications in the event of a local outage or disaster. All of the major public cloud providers offer Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS).

Anything that involves storing and processing huge volumes of data at high speeds—and requires more storage and computing capacity than most organizations can or want to purchase and deploy on-premises—is a target for cloud computing. Examples include:

  • Big data analytics
  • Internet of Things (IoT)
  • [Artificial intelligenceparticularly [machine learning]applications

For development teams adopting Agile or [DevOps (or [DevSecOpsto streamline development, cloud offers the on-demand end-user self-service that keeps operations tasks—such as spinning up development and test servers—from becoming development bottlenecks.

If you are looking for emerging use cases of cloud computing then check out our cloud computing use case index covering many industry verticals, horizontal functions and user personas.

An ideal use case for “the cloud” would be a service that a) lends itself to being delivered over the Internet while b) also not being a capability for which your company needs to develop expertise. So a great example of a cloud service that’s appropriate for most small- to medium-sized businesses is email. Most everyone is comfortable getting their personal email over the Internet, so it’s not a stretch to run a business using an email service rather than setting up one’s own dedicated email servers. And unless your business is built around setting up email servers, there’s really little point in building up internal expertise around email server configuration and junkmail filtering. It’s far better to hand those responsibilities off to a company that specializes in email – plus you’ll likely save a ton of time and money.