Revisit Your Cloud: It May Save You More Time and Money Than You Think

Has 2020 shaken your company’s Work From Home strategy?

Cloud technology is what enables employees to work from any location, giving them access via a virtual environment to the same information that they’d have access to from the office. Collaboration and communication tools ensure that your customers’ employees can use the latest techniques and complete work at the same level as they would be able to from their office desktop.

It also allows you to save time and money on office space while opening your recruiting to top talent anywhere in the world.

Employees can access documents and data that they need by using specific credentials to maintain security at the same time as giving them flexibility to work from home or any other location. This can be useful when your customers have multiple office locations, such as if they have a primary central office and smaller remote offices from additional locations. Cloud technology provides a greater level of flexibility and shared access to information centrally accessible via a single server.

Below are some of the best solutions in the business

1. Amazon Web Services

Creative cloud computing from one of the big names

Highly customizableFree trialSome customer support issues
AWS was founded in 2006. It provides on demand cloud computing to individuals and organizations.

Amazon Web Services is a cloud-based program for building business solutions using integrated web services. AWS offers an extensive range of IaaS and PaaS services. These include Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), Elastic Beanstalk, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Relational Database Service (RDS)

AWS offers extensive admin controls available via their secure Web client. Users can access a number of features from here including encryption key creation and auditing.

Aws lets you customize infrastructure requirements. This costs far less than if you were set up in your own premises.

Users can also access EC2 we services. This permits you to run and acquire servers as necessary.

AWS has three different pricing models; ‘Pay as you Go’, ‘Save when you reserve’ and ‘Pay less using more’. For more information about these, users must contact sale directly.

AWS also offers a free 12-month tier. Once your trial period has expired, you must either choose a paid plan or cancel your AWS subscription.

2. Microsoft Azure

A wide array of services from a tech giant

Microsoft Azure was released nearly a decade ago, in 2010. Users can run any service on the cloud or combine it with any existing applications, data centre or infrastructure.

Microsoft Azure provides a wide array of solutions suitable for all types of industry. All your business needs will be taken into consideration. This results in a package better suited for needs.

Azure means there is no need to have physical servers on site. This reduces the usual costs, such as an onsite server support team.

The Azure Migration Centre makes cloud transfers faster and easier. The solution is also compatible with Linux.

Microsoft Azure offers a 12-month free tier which includes access to all popular services, $200 (£153.74) credit and over 25 ‘Always Free’ services. All of Microsoft Azure’s prices and plans are laid out in great detail on their site. The page includes a cost calculator and a ‘Pay as you go’ service. Each plan can be tailored to your specific needs.

Some users have noted that the price can be quite high relative to other services.

3. Google Cloud

Elastic and inexpensive cloud computing from the genii of Google

User friendly 12-month free trial, although Setup can be tricky

Google Cloud Platform is Google’s cloud service provider. The platform enables users to create business solutions using Google-provided, modular web services. It offers a wide array of services including IaaS and PaaS solutions.

With Google Cloud’s multi layered secure infrastructure, users can rest assured that anything you build, create, code or store will be protected. This is done through a commitment to transparency and a highly trained team of engineers.

Google Cloud has a variety of tools to ensure consistent performance and management. These include Compute Engine, App Engine, Container Engine, Cloud Storage and Big Query. Google also offers smooth migration to virtual machines with flexible pricing.

There is a free 12-month trial, which includes $300 (£230.62) towards all services and products offered by Google Cloud Platform.

Some online commenters have mentioned that setup can be difficult for beginners.

4. IBM Cloud

Reasonably priced cloud services from one of the tech masters

IBM Cloud is a set of cloud computing services offered by the eponymous tech giant IBM. The solution offers platform as a service, software as a service and infrastructure as a service.

IBM Cloud offers a wide range of services. Not all of them are cloud based: it covers both virtual and hardware –based servers, composed of public, private and management networks.

As hardware and virtual-based servers are combined into one on demand cloud-platform, you have complete infrastructure control. IBM refer to their hardware servers as ‘bare metal’. These provide clients with sole access to their entire server. This reduces the ‘noisy neighbor’ effect and greatly improves performance.

IBM Cloud is integrated and managed by a single system that can be controlled via web portal, API (Application Programming Interface) or mobile apps.

IBM Cloud’s Bluemix developing solution has a wide range of cloud SaaS management tools.

IBM Cloud also offers full server customization. This means that everything that is included in the server is handpicked by you. This way you do not have to pay for features that you might never use.

IBM also offer a ‘Lite’ tier. This has no time limit, will not ask for credit card details and includes 256MB of Cloud Foundry Memory. After this you have the option of the ‘Pay as you Go’ Tier where you only pay for what you use. The website has a calculator which you can use to estimate costs. If neither of these are suitable, you can contact IBM for a subscription package tailored to suit your needs.

5. Oracle Cloud

Another IT behemoth cloud service

Oracle Cloud is another cloud service from a computing behemoth, and as you’d expect it’s both a powerful and feature-packed platform. A recent Forrester review noted that Oracle’s services were especially strong at supporting different workloads, especially for IoT, OLTP, microservices, along with applications dependent on AI and machine learning. There are two main service provisions available: cloud architecture, and storage data.

Cloud architecture includes data management, databases, and applications, while the Oracle Data Cloud is primarily for driving big data analytics for business intelligence insights. Oracle also provides a range of SaaS (Software as a Service) platforms such as HCM, EPM, SCM, and social media tools.

As expected, there are a vast range of potential involved in using Oracle’s cloud services, but they are really designed to accommodate enterprise needs rather than small businesses or individuals.

For those who do sign up, aside from a 30-day free trial, Oracle Cloud also offers a free service tier which includes unlimited access to two autonomous databases which comes with Oracle Application Express (APEX) and Oracle SQL

Developer, as well as two compute VMs, block, object, and archive storage, as well as load balancing, monitoring, and notifications.