What is cloud computing? How does it work? What are the benefits?

Do you know what Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo, Disney, Amazon, Tinder, Netflix, Instagram, and thousands of other platforms have in common ? They all use cloud computing. 

When we talk about the idea of ​​accessing various services and files without the need to install or transfer files to your computer, but only using the internet, we are referring to the concept behind so-called cloud computing, or in plain English, cloud computing.

In this article, we’ll understand the concept behind cloud computing, how it works, and what its features are for our lives. We’ll also explore the benefits of cloud computing, which has revolutionized the digital age.

What is cloud computing?

We can define cloud computing as the provision of on-demand computing services over the internet.

Cloud computing works for everyone, from the simplest internet user to small, medium, and large businesses, which increasingly need to use cloud computing services to grow, increase revenue, and reduce costs.

This is because cloud computing is the delivery of information technology resources on demand via the internet. And how it impacts a company’s day-to-day operations, for example. Instead of purchasing, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, your business can access technology services, such as computing capacity, storage, and databases, as needed, using a cloud provider.

This strategic choice tends to generate significant savings in resources, in addition to other advantages that we will discuss later.

But its use isn’t limited to the corporate world. In fact, we can’t imagine the world today without considering how cloud computing is embedded in every aspect of our lives, from email to online spreadsheets to file hosting and synchronization services like Dropbox and Google Drive.

How does cloud computing work?

Let’s consider a situation: you’ve just taken a trip to France and captured dozens and hundreds of high-resolution videos and photos. Upon arriving back, you realized your computer didn’t have enough memory or space to store these files efficiently and securely. 

What is the solution found to solve this problem? 

Using a service like Google Photos will store your files efficiently and securely, and you’ll be able to access them with just an internet connection, as they’re stored in the cloud—that is, on the internet. This is how cloud computing works.  

Storing your files in the cloud ensures that they don’t depend on space on your computer, and therefore, on the health of your computer. Files stored only on one computer, for example, depend on its functionality. If the computer breaks down and stops working, the files disappear.

This is one of the biggest advantages of cloud computing: it guarantees the life of your files, data, or corporate systems, regardless of whether you have a computer or data center.

Cloud computing and the corporate world

We’ve talked so far about how cloud computing benefits our daily lives, through the use of email services like Gmail, which offers a space for you to store files, or through the use of an online spreadsheet, or through the consumption of services like Netflix, Spotify, Facebook, Instagram, among others.

However, thinking about the corporate world, cloud computing has revolutionized a large part of the industry, if not the entire industry.

Sectors such as agriculture, finance, retail, healthcare, and many others benefit from the use of cloud computing to grow, develop solidly, and above all, increase revenue and reduce costs.

And how do they use cloud computing? We’ll see more about that later.

Cloud computing applications

We say that the healthcare sector benefits from cloud computing, and this happens, for example, when they use the cloud to develop more personalized treatments for their patients.

Financial services companies, for example, use the cloud as a foundation to detect and prevent fraud in real time, creating greater security for both companies and their customers.

Every company, whether public or private, small or large, uses cloud computing systems to remain competitive and reliable.

We can define some applications for cloud computing:

• Free or paid email services;
• Photo and file storage;
• Database management ;
• Application testing and development;
• Streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify;
• Customer relationship management (CRM);
• File backup and disaster recovery;
• Storage, hosting and server services;
• Shared, real-time document editing.

What are the benefits of cloud computing?

It’s impossible to imagine a world without cloud computing these days. However, just over 10 years ago, the world existed without it, and that’s precisely why we can compare these worlds and highlight the advantages of its use.

Cost reduction

The first major advantage of cloud computing is cost reduction . 

Imagine you own a company and want to develop a new customer management system. Instead of setting up an entire IT infrastructure and hiring professionals to maintain this system, you can simply hire, with the help of a professional, the entire necessary structure in the cloud, without needing physical space or logistics to make it work.

You won’t need to worry about issues like safety, maintenance, or expenses related to component defects, because the contracted service already has a system that meets all these demands.

This way, you can focus on what your company really needs, which is to improve products and the quality of services provided, instead of spending time and money to set up a physical infrastructure that is currently unnecessary.

This can be considered the biggest advantage of cloud computing and has allowed many small businesses to grow systematically.

Scalability

We’ve already said that cost reduction is the biggest advantage of cloud computing, but another advantage we can highlight is the unlimited possibility of scalability.

What do you mean? This means there are no limits to growth. Your company can start by contracting services that meet your current needs, but at any time, without much bureaucracy, you can increase or decrease the use of that service, depending on your usage or growth.

Let’s imagine you own a sales company and your website experiences very high traffic peaks during a specific time of year, such as Christmas or Black Friday. With this in mind, you can increase the services you use, such as hosting servers for your website, during these specific times, and return to normal during other times of the year, paying only the equivalent amounts.

This way you avoid unnecessary expenses such as purchasing and acquiring additional equipment for a specific moment, but after that, these purchases will be unused and the equipment will certainly lose its function.

Security

Another major advantage is security, a key factor for a company to generate sustainable and solid growth. The security costs for a business, regardless of size, are significant, and hiring an entire infrastructure to ensure the security of its data will generate significant costs.

By using cloud computing, the company reduces costs and increases security, since the responsible services already have security know-how that guarantees the health of your business data and, most importantly, allows your team to focus solely on production, generating very high security for the business.  

Other advantages of cloud computing:

• Much higher speed of connections and data exchange;
• Globalization of corporate relations;
• Greater productivity in studies and work, since there is no need to worry about the structure necessary to maintain oneself;
• Much greater reliability in storing data and information in the cloud compared to physical locations.

Conclusion

Cloud computing may seem like a very complex term to understand, but when we look deeper, we realize that it’s not only simple but also something we know through osmosis, that is, through our daily use.

The use of cloud computing can be seen in many aspects of our daily lives, from the moment you read your emails to the moment you store photos from that event on Google’s, Amazon’s, or Microsoft’s photo service.