Five ways to use the cloud and stumbling blocks along the way

Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Nick Heath.

The practice of renting virtualised pools of servers and storage over the net is known as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and is the most popular class of cloud service available today. But most businesses are only making limited use of IaaS, with the majority restricting their use to spinning up application development and test environments or to rapidly provisioning extra server capacity during periods of heavy demand.

The reasons for this limited adoption are many: concerns about security of data and systems controlled by a third party, worries over the reliability of systems run by a cloud provider and served over the internet, and the premium paid for getting a vendor to provide infrastructure over running it in-house…

But where demand for IT services is uneven, fluctuating between high and low-demand, or where a business needs infrastructure to test applications for a short period or to try out a new endeavour, it can be more cost effective and far quicker to rent infrastructure from a cloud provider than attempting to build it in-house. There are even instances of companies like Netflix, which runs its entire IT operation on Amazon Web Services’ infrastructure…

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