People engage with cloud-based services in many ways—from online shopping to music streaming. Businesses engage with cloud computing in a wide variety of ways, too. Software services and applications, large and small database hosting, data warehousing, internet of things and a lot more. In fact, McKinsey estimates that cloud computing delivers $673 billion in value to enterprises each year. Some of that value comes from cost savings, but the vast majority of it is from enabling innovation.
For example, the cloud offers developers on-demand, scalable resources that help them develop and test cloud native applications—and the same scalability helps IT meet demand for development and testing environments as business needs change. This on-demand self-service and scalability can help IT reduce or eliminate the need to purchase and maintain servers in an organization’s data centers.
Most major cloud service providers offer a utility pricing model, so organizations only pay for the cloud services they use. This can significantly reduce operating costs. In addition, most of these cloud service providers offer a range of tools for automation and scalability, including dashboards for real-time statistics and AI-driven data analytics.
Many customers adopt a multicloud strategy to avoid vendor lock-in and access more innovation. Using open source container orchestration platforms, like Kubernetes, these customers can deploy their applications across on-premises data centers, in public clouds, private clouds and edge settings. They can also leverage these platforms to integrate with and extend the capabilities of their cloud service provider.