COVID Pandemic made the world suffer a lot and went through a lot of changes in the way we live our day-to-day life. The information technology (IT) industry has also gone through an initial struggle and the industry had major challenges in its operations.Many IT organizations faced initial struggle on the pandemic lockdown and they were able to come back to a regular schedule with the help of cloud technologies. Many organizations were able to easily transform the work to remote (Teleworking) with the help of Cloud Technologies. I will describe about cloud technologies, types, and how they helped during the pandemic.
Cloud Technologies
Cloud Technologies / Cloud Computing is also known as Cloud which helps to manage software application resources, data storage in an easily sharable and cost-effective way in the high level. Cloud provides servers, storage, databases, networking, software, data analytics through the internet and it helps the organizations with flexible resources configuration, innovation, and economically cost-effective. Organizations typically pay only what that they use, this helps organizations to lower the operating costs, infrastructure runs more efficiently, scale up as business needs. It also gives stability in the maintenance. In the following sections, we will look into high-level details of types of cloud computing, cloud services, and companies providing those services.
Type of Cloud Computing
The different types of cloud computing are available and each has its own benefits. Each of them is unique and not all suitable to everyone. Every business is different and they have to go through these options and select the right one for them.
- Public Cloud
Public cloud is fully owned and managed by third-party companies which provide cloud services for server, application deployment, storage, database, and maintenance.
- Private Cloud
Private cloud is cloud computing fully used by a single organization and is configured specifically to the organization’s needs.
- Hybrid Cloud
Hybrid cloud is a combination of public and private clouds. This gives greater flexibility to the organization on maintaining the application on the organization setup with enhanced public cloud for data storage or using third party services.
- Gov cloud
Gov cloud is designed for U.S. Federal, State, and Local Governments to meet the U.S. Government’s security and compliance regulations. its compliance with FedRAMP, HIPAA, and CJIS standards.
What are the types of Cloud Services?
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
This option is to provide the IT infrastructure such as servers, VMs through the internet. This is similar to a computer /rack server on-premises but IaaS is hosted on the cloud. Cloud computing company provides the resources but organization should be responsible for installing the software and maintaining them. This option reduces the organization’s initial on-premises environments setup cost and it also helps to setup / discontinue the resources easily. In simple terms, we can also call this as renting the servers.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS)
This option is famous and most used in cloud computing. This option comes as a bundle with software, storage, and usage. Complete development and deployment on the cloud. It is fully virtualized and easy to customize as user needs. It is easy to set up and can be used for any type of organization (from small to big organizations). This option also helps to set up and implement DevOps.
- Serverless computing
This option helps to focus the development team on the technical implementation and not to worry about the infrastructure & setup. Mainly used to create and deploy functions, API gateway. The programming runs on the servers only but the name came as serverless since the development team no need worry about the infrastructure.
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
This is custom ready-made software to use. It helps the organization’s business to streamline and follow the industry standards.
How it helped the organization overpass the COVID pandemic?
Cloud computing helped organizations to do the IT remote job easily, it is easy to deploy/maintain the application from anywhere, cost-effective, low/no infrastructure maintenance etc. There are many cloud computing provider exists in the market. Here are the details of some of the cloud services provides.
| Cloud Services | laaS | PasS | Serverless Computing |
| Microsoft Azure | Azure | Azure | Azure Functions |
| AWS | Amazon Web Services (AWS) | AWS Elastic Beanstalk | AWS Lambdas |
| Google Cloud | Google Compute Engine (GCE) | Google App Engine | Cloud Functions |
IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and other providers also have similar options. Office 365, Salesforce cloud are Software as a Service examples.
Here are some Real-time examples:
- The sudden pandemic lockdown was a struggle for one of our clients. They had to provide laptops / RSA tokens to all of their employees within a short period of time to make the entire organization work remotely. There was not much time for new procurement so they went through various options and finally they have decided to go with the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) option with one of the major cloud service companies. They purchased the IaaS option and linked it with office 365 authentication and it was configured to RDP to the office computers so this was a convenient option to overcome the pandemic lockdown immediate remote work provision to all the employees. This was successful and all the employees were able to do the remote job.
- One of our other clients was starting a new project and we went through everything on the cloud without on-premises. They have purchased Platform as a Service (PaaS) for software deployment, file strong (for blob), and database storage. Used DevOps tool for project schedule, code repository, CI/CD.
Conclusion
Cloud technologies are emerging in the IT sectors and it helps the organization to do their job in a convenient and cost-effective way. It greatly helps to do their job without location constraint and it gives flexibility on the development, deployment, and maintenance. These are the reasons cloud technologies were helpful during the pandemic.