When an organization uses cloud computing, they do not have to buy and maintain expensive hardware.

Cloud computing has been credited with increasing competitiveness through cost savings, greater flexibility, elasticity and optimal resource utilization. As a technology, cloud computing is much more than the sum of its parts. It opens doors to cloud-native technologies, supports more efficient ways of working and enables emerging capabilities in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).

Here’s how organizations are putting cloud computing to work to drive business value.

1. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) delivers fundamental compute, network and storage resources to consumers on-demand, over the Internet and on a pay-as-you-go basis. Using cloud infrastructure on a pay-per-use scheme enables companies to save on the costs of acquiring, managing and maintaining their own IT infrastructure. Plus, the cloud is easily accessible. Most major cloud service providers — including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure — offer IaaS with their cloud computing services.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provides customers a complete cloud platform — hardware, software and infrastructure — for developing, running and managing applications without the cost, complexity and inflexibility of building and maintaining that platform on-premises. Organizations may turn to PaaS for the same reasons they look to IaaS; they want to increase the speed of development on a ready-to-use platform and deploy applications with a predictable and cost-effective pricing model.

2. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

While Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is similar to the IaaS and PaaS uses described above, it actually deserves its own mention for the undeniable change this model has brought about in the way companies use software. SaaS offers software access online via a subscription, rather than IT teams having to buy and install it on individual systems.

SaaS providers, like Salesforce, enable software access anywhere, anytime, as long as there’s an Internet connection. These tools have opened access to more advanced tools and capabilities, like automation, optimized workflows and collaboration in real-time in various locations.

3. Hybrid cloud and multicloud

Hybrid cloud is a computing environment that connects a company’s on-premises private cloud services and third-party public cloud services into a single, flexible infrastructure for running critical applications and workloads. This unique mix of public and private cloud resources makes it easier to select the optimal cloud for each application or workload and then move the workloads freely between the two clouds as circumstances change. With a hybrid cloud infrastructure, technical and business objectives are fulfilled more effectively and cost-efficiently than could be achieved with a public or private cloud alone.

The video "Hybrid Cloud Explained" provides a more in-depth discussion of the computing environment:

Multicloud takes things a step further and allows organizations to use two or more clouds from different cloud providers. This type of cloud computing can include any mix of IaaS, PaaS or SaaS resources. With multicloud, workloads can be run in different cloud environments to match unique needs. This also means that companies can avoid vendor lock-in.

To learn more about how these options compare, see "Distributed Cloud vs. Hybrid Cloud vs. Multicloud vs. Edge Computing."

4. Test and development

One of the best use cases for the cloud is a software development environment. DevOps teams can quickly spin up development, testing and production environments tailored for specific needs. This can include, but is not limited to, automated provisioning of physical and virtual machines.

To perform testing and development in-house, organizations must secure a budget and set up the testing environment with physical assets. Then comes the installation and configuration of development platform. All this can often extend the time it takes for a project to be completed and stretch out the milestones. Cloud computing speeds up this process with cloud-based development tools that make creating apps and software faster, easier and more cost-effective.

One of the top benefits of cloud computing is how it facilitates the DevOps process, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native advancements (e.g., microservices, serverless and containerization). These technologies have led to rapid acceleration and innovation, but also require a self-sustaining cloud infrastructure to support the hundreds of services.

5. Big data analytics

By leveraging the computing power of cloud computing, companies can gain powerful insights and optimize business processes through big data analytics.

There is a massive amount of data collected each day from corporate endpoints, cloud applications and the users who interact with them. Cloud computing allows organizations to tap into vast quantities of both structured and unstructured data available to harness the benefit of extracting business value.

Retailers and suppliers are now extracting information derived from consumers’ buying patterns to target their advertising and marketing campaigns to a particular segment of the population. Social networking platforms are providing the basis for analytics on behavioral patterns that organizations are using to derive meaningful information. Businesses like these and more are also able to harness deeper insights through machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), two capabilities made possible with cloud computing.

Learn more about the intricacies of these technologies by reading "AI vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning vs. Neural Networks."

6. Cloud storage

Cloud data storage enables files to be automatically saved to the cloud, and then they can be accessed, stored and retrieved from any device with an Internet connection.  Rather than maintaining their own data centers for storage, organizations can only pay for the amount of cloud storage they are actually consuming and do so without the worries of overseeing the daily maintenance of the storage infrastructure. The result is higher availability, speed, scalability and security for the data storage environment.

In situations where regulations and concerns about sensitive data are at play, organizations can store data either on- or off-premises, in a private or hybrid cloud model, for added security.

7. Disaster recovery and data backup

Yet another benefit derived from using cloud is the cost-effectiveness of a disaster recovery (DR) solution that provides for faster recovery from a mesh of different physical locations at a much lower cost than a traditional DR site.

Building a DR site and testing a business continuity plan can be an extremely expensive and time-consuming task with fixed assets. When built in the cloud, however, organizations can replicate their production site and constantly replicate data and configuration settings, saving considerable time and resources.

Similarly, backing up data has always been a complex and time-consuming operation. Cloud-based backup, while not being the panacea, is certainly a far cry from what it used to be. Organizations can now automatically dispatch data to any location with the assurance that neither security, availability, nor capacity are issues.

While these top seven uses of cloud computing are not exhaustive, it shows the clear incentives for using the cloud to increase IT infrastructure flexibility, while also making the most of big data analytics, mobile computing and emerging technologies.

IBM Cloud

IBM Cloud offers the most open and secure public cloud platform for business, a next-generation hybrid multicloud platform, advanced data and AI capabilities, and deep enterprise expertise across 20 industries. IBM Cloud hybrid cloud solutions deliver flexibility and portability for both applications and data. Linux®, Kubernetes and containers support this hybrid cloud stack, and they combine with RedHat® OpenShift® to create a common platform connecting on-premises and cloud resources.

Learn how IBM Cloud solutions can help your organization with the following:

To get started, sign up for an IBM ID and create your IBM Cloud account.

• Trade fixed expense for variable expense – Instead of having to invest heavily in data centers and servers before you know how you’re going to use them, you can pay only when you consume computing resources, and pay only for how much you consume.

• Benefit from massive economies of scale – By using cloud computing, you can achieve a lower variable cost than you can get on your own. Because usage from hundreds of thousands of customers is aggregated in the cloud, providers such as AWS can achieve higher economies of scale, which translates into lower pay as-you-go prices.

• Stop guessing capacity – Eliminate guessing on your infrastructure capacity needs. When you make a capacity decision prior to deploying an application, you often end up either sitting on expensive idle resources or dealing with limited capacity. With cloud computing, these problems go away. You can access as much or as little capacity as you need, and scale up and down as required with only a few minutes’ notice.

• Increase speed and agility – In a cloud computing environment, new IT resources are only a click away, which means that you reduce the time to make those resources available to your developers from weeks to just minutes. This results in a dramatic increase in agility for the organization, since the cost and time it takes to experiment and develop is significantly lower.

• Stop spending money running and maintaining data centers – Focus on projects that differentiate your business, not the infrastructure. Cloud computing lets you focus on your own customers, rather than on the heavy lifting of racking, stacking, and powering servers.

• Go global in minutes – Easily deploy your application in multiple regions around the world with just a few clicks. This means you can provide lower latency and a better experience for your customers at minimal cost.

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