Benefits of Public Cloud – Right for Your Business in 2022?

If you’re a medium to enterprise business that is growing, and you’re considering what technology infrastructure will best support your business, you may want to consider public cloud services. If you’ve already started a cloud deployment after using on-premises data centers or colocation, or you’re just starting to explore your options, we’ll take you through the ins, outs, and benefits of public cloud.

What is the public cloud?

Public cloud infrastructure, also known as hyperscale infrastructure, allows organizations to scale quickly without worrying about paying extra for the aspects of physical infrastructure. A sudden or seasonal surge in demand shouldn’t stall your business operations. A public cloud environment uses virtual machines and physical servers to keep a large, distributed computing environment running. No more paying for equipment, space, or utilities you don’t use. With public cloud services, you pay for what you need, when you need it.

What are some examples of public cloud providers?

Some of the most popular public cloud providers include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Alibaba, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). TierPoint works with Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure to provide this type of cloud service to our customers.

Whichever provider works best for your needs, TierPoint can help you walk through the public cloud migration and management process. Azure’s pay-as-you-go approach and breadth of services help minimize overhead and move organizations along the digital transformation path, all with robust security features. We also deliver secure and reliable AWS infrastructure to clients to help accelerate business transformation, making a potentially complex deployment and management scenario as painless as possible.

What are some of the benefits of public cloud services?

Saving on overhead expenses

Overhead can add up quickly, and one of the biggest benefits of moving your data to the public cloud is that you can add resources as needed in a cost-effective manner without having to worry about:

• additional cooling
• power
• cabling
• maintenance
• capital expenses, like equipment upgrades and real estate management

Most public cloud providers also offer pay-as-you-go models for services.

Working with large public cloud providers

Working with a large provider striving to stay competitive also means you will enjoy regular updates and iterations on services. Prominent public cloud providers will also offer best-in-class services, such as top-tier protection for your sensitive data, up-to-date support for operating systems, a reliable internet connection, and may also allow penetration testing of vulnerabilities within specific operating guidelines.

Cutting down on setup time

Public cloud computing models aren’t only beneficial from a cost savings perspective, it’s efficient as well. Scalable cloud resources can be spun up quickly when demand is added to the system, say through a sudden surge in traffic from a promotion or seasonal surge. Massive storage capacity is even possible with large public cloud providers.

Easy scalability

Along with saving time, scalability can bring ease to your operations. With public cloud, you can create nimble virtual machines that can grow and shrink, balance workloads, and save yourself from server-intensive computing.

Improved business continuity

What would happen to your operations if a disaster occurred – say, a power outage, or a ransomware attack? Moving legacy workloads to the cloud will help enable easier backup and disaster recovery options, getting you back to business sooner. This is often the case with moving any on-premises applications or data to any cloud.

Also read: The Strategic Guide to Cloud Computing

Which workloads aren’t a good fit for public cloud?

While you can tailor some things to fit your needs, public cloud isn’t as personalized as private cloud. There are workloads that will not work in the public cloud. Some examples are:

• workloads with highly specific needs
• operations that adhere to predictable and data requirements, like data residency and compliance requirements
• legacy applications that are not built to run in the public cloud
• workloads that require more stringent security compliance

However, working with a managed services provider can help you find the right solution for your business. In some instances, managed services providers will help businesses develop a hybrid or multicloud environment that uses a mix of public cloud, private cloud, colocation, and/or non-cloud platforms.

How can public cloud be a key asset to hybrid cloud or multicloud infrastructure?

Hybrid IT can include public cloud services, sometimes from multiple cloud providers, along with non-cloud infrastructure hosted on-premises, or colocated systems. Public cloud is designed so that multiple customers can take advantage of pooled resources, optimizing their use and improving the bottom line for everyone. Multi-cloud infrastructure involves shopping around to multiple public cloud providers and choosing which resources make sense for you per cloud.

Hybrid or multi-cloud environments can also include a public cloud service in the overall IT infrastructure. Say there’s one particular resource you’d like to spin up quickly, make available worldwide, and have it be highly scalable. That application can live in a public cloud environment, and you can be free from investing in hardware.

As enterprises continue to look for solutions that offer a combination of public, SaaS, and multi-tenant solutions alongside private, dedicated solutions, the relationship between hybrid cloud infrastructure and public cloud services will continue to grow. Instead of trying to push a square peg into a round hole, hybrid environments allow organizations to place different applications in different environments (for example, a fluid application works better in the cloud, while a static application can do better in a private environment).

We can help you reach the data center of the future

Finding the right data center infrastructure for your business will be key to achieving your business goals. A good data center provider can also design and manage all or parts of your multicloud and hybrid environments.

Our experts and network of technology providers are critical to helping customers stay innovative and competitive. We can help you assess your digital infrastructure and find the right solution to drive your future growth. Contact us to learn more.