Cloud Hosting

Over the past decade, technology has changed the way many companies conduct their business, enabling an unprecedented level of collaboration, flexibility, and productivity. For most industries, the Internet has been the single most disruptive tool of this century. In a study conducted by 451 Research, 90% of surveyed organisations reported that they were already using some form of cloud computing service to augment their business. In the same vein, Gartner predicts that the global cloud services market will grow exponentially through 2022, reaching an estimated $331 billion.

While leveraging these technologies is the goal of many businesses today, there can be huge costs associated with infrastructure, hiring talent, and maintenance. Cloud service providers offer a solution to this problem, allowing business owners to pay a monthly price for hardware, internet infrastructure, and other services.

Why Businesses Favour the Cloud

Besides lowering the initial cost of admission, cloud-based services offer a slew of advantages related to security, availability, reliability, and scalability. To understand why cloud computing has turned into a multi-billion dollar industry within a few short years, let us expand on each of these benefits.

While data security is integral to the functioning of any business, many non-IT enterprises are inadequately equipped to deal with viruses, ransomware, and other attacks. Large financial institutions, for instance, have been the target of many security breaches of late, with American bank, Capital One, finding itself in the middle of a data leak controversy as recently as September 2019.

Cloud providers specialise in maintaining a secure physical and virtual environment to ensure that their clients data is protected in accordance with local laws and regulations. With the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018, many businesses have to tread carefully around the storage and use of personal information. By leveraging the expertise of existing service providers, companies can abstract a great deal of the compliance overhead at little cost.

Any company with an online presence needs to ensure that its services are available at all times. However, businesses that rely on in-house infrastructure often report that this can be an extremely challenging process. Data centres, in contrast, are specifically engineered to migrate workloads in the event of a failure, ensuring consistent uptime and a virtually seamless experience for end-users.

Business owners also do not have to worry about aspects such as disaster recovery, hardware-software incompatibilities, and data loss. Service providers have the resources to build fail-safes and prevent downtimes, even in the most dire of situations.

In todays fast paced environment, companies are often unable to estimate the exact amount of computing resources they need for a certain task. Furthermore, businesses that experience short bursts of consumer interest may have to temporarily ramp up their infrastructure. However, buying additional hardware specifically to handle these rare occurrences can be a wasteful and expensive endeavour.

Cloud service providers offer a robust and scalable platform capable of handling variable processing or storage requirements. Many providers also offer a pay-as-you-go plan, so that companies are not compelled to pay for services they do not need or use.

The Future of Cloud

Around a third of all companies IT budget - an average of $2.2 million - is already devoted to cloud computing-related services such as email and web hosting. Cloud service providers are uniquely positioned to cater to this market segment, particularly since budgets for digital transformation appear to be on the rise at many companies. However, identifying these opportunities might be challenging due to the lack of market data.

Data providers, however, can help mitigate this problem by offering up-to-date information on up and coming startups. Oddup, for instance, specialises in providing real-time data on the global startup ecosystem across a multitude of industries and geographic locations. Oddup offers decision-makers proprietary tools like the Oddup Score and the Benchmark Valuation, which estimate the health, potential, and valuation of a startup, as well as exclusive startup scouting reports which highlight potentially disruptive companies, and markets and industries which show growing startup activity.

Data providers can also help with a new challenge that even established cloud service providers are facing. Some of the worlds largest technology giants are spearheading the cloud computing revolution, however, the markets rapidly growing size means that there is plenty of space for smaller enterprises with unique services and offerings. Currently, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Alibaba hold the vast majority of the global cloud market share. These companies could face strong competition from smaller vendors with the emergence of new technologies such as machine learning, blockchain, and Internet of Things (IoT).

This is resulting in the emergence of new, smaller Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). ISVs are both threat and opportunity for the larger players. Consequently, larger companies are on the lookout for disruptive ISVs with whom they can partner or whom they can acquire. Data providers like Oddup aid in identification of such ISVs too, enabling cloud service providers to expand both, their portfolios and client base.

As modern businesses continue to generate and process more data, cloud computing is set to become the primary focus at many companies. This fact is especially true for smaller companies and startups, which also have significantly lower capital on hand and have variable needs. With an increasing global emphasis on cloud computing services, we will likely see an exponential rise in the number of internet-enabled startups and companies over the next few years.

Disclaimer: Content Produced by Oddup

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