Common Use Cases for Public Cloud

You have seen clouds in the sky, and have probably heard about virtual clouds on the web. These could be private, public or hybrid. In this article we will focus on public clouds, available to the general public to use over the Internet. Let's take a look at the most common public cloud use cases when businesses benefit from them and when you can, too.

Public Cloud Use Cases:

• Web hosting on the cloud

Web resources, which don’t interact with any internal system and need round-the-clock connectivity can choose hosting on the cloud, ready to scale and grow on demand. Actually, hosting for websites and web apps is one of the most common uses of public cloud computing.

• DR (Disaster recovery)

If you want your data to be able to recover completely in a case of natural disaster that results in hardware damage or in case of software failures due to errors, malware, or cyberattacks, then take advantage of the public cloud. It can be used for backup and disaster recovery. It’s best to keep your data stored and backed up in several locations for a higher level of security. All cloud providers offer a range of DR options built-in to their services.

• Web development and QA testing

When you want to have your enterprise app add some new functionality, you can store it in a cloud before its official release. This will simplify the process of building and testing your software product, especially when development team members are situated in different places. All of them will be able to access the cloud to make their changes, which will be visible in real time to all the other people involved in the web project.

• Short-term projects

A cloud offers great possibilities and tools for short-term projects like, for example, a micro-site for a month or two. Just use it during that short period and then demolish it when all the needed work is over. Such projects can easily find success in setting up cloud environments so they can be ready in minutes or hours, as opposed to days or weeks as with traditional hardware requisitioning.

• Global web resources

Those giant online businesses that embrace the globe have their international target audience dispersed across their vast territory. However, the smaller the geographical distance between a data center and a particular user is, the quicker the stored data will be delivered. Thus, similar to the content delivery networks (CDN), cloud computing can work well for global web resources.

• Spikes and drops in traffic

Many businesses have to take into account seasonality. Seasonality is especially a challenge to e-commerce sites. Website and app owners should consider summer marketing and winter marketing, and react to spikes and drops in traffic during different periods. In such cases the public cloud will help you save money. You can increase the capacity for occasional traffic peaks like during the holiday retail season and turn it to the minimum when the demand is low. This will provide cost optimization.

• Historical data archiving

You can use the public cloud to archive your organization’s historical data, which you don’t need for big data analytics and other purposes that require frequent access. Many companies move their historical data from data centers to the cloud to store it there for a long term.

You can find one, or perhaps a few, cases mentioned above that are most appropriate for you. Sure, you can combine using a public cloud with your traditional infrastructure. However, public clouds give you obvious cost benefits, along with scalability and flexibility. Take all the advantage you can and contact us if you have any questions.