You are an owner of a small business, or a senior executive of a medium-size enterprise. You are constantly concerned about the risks your business faces.
Whether it’s effectively monitoring your costs, getting the most out of your data to aid decision making or being prepared for the unknown, you need to be confident that your business is well positioned to be future ready.
TMH Solutions is dedicated to help you deal with these issues, and help you to sleep well at night. We can do this by introducing you to the advantages of Cloud Computing. So let's get started!
No doubt, whether it's on-site in your company's building or in a shared data centre, you have at least one server serving up a website or applications and data that you use internally. Servers are essentially big and powerful computers built to handle the many visits to websites and provide enough computing power for other requests to software applications. If one server is not enough to allow a site and applications to stay responsive, consider the spike of requests retailers experience during black Friday for instance, then you can always add more servers with identical applications installed to share the burden.
Enter the Virtual Server! Imagine a bento box that you bring your lunch in. There is the larger box with compartment boxes inside that have their own contents not mixing with the others. Virtual servers are like the bento box containers where the bento box itself is a physical server. The bento box [physical] server provides the container [virtual] servers with all of the resources they need such as processing power and storage space. The container [virtual] server runs just like a bento box [physical] one in many respects. In fact, when logged into one, you wouldn't see much difference at all.
Now, given that a container [virtual] server's resources are borrowed from a bento box [physical] server, imagine the ability for container [virtual] servers to use resources from more than one bento box [physical] server! Ignore how its done but in essence, you can take some processing power from one bento box [physical] server, some storage space from another and so on. Inside your container [virtual] server, it still looks just like a regular one but the bento box got more complicated. At this point, you can have many bento box [physical] servers with many more container [virtual] servers spanning across them. As long as your server works the way you want it then what happens under the hood is unimportant. Because container [virtual] servers are just software, their resources can be tuned with a couple of clicks.
On a basic level, THAT is cloud computing!
The bento box [physical] servers can also run other software besides the container [virtual] servers. Imagine that bento boxes could treat software like Microsoft Office like the container [virtual] servers. That is how Google Workspace and Office 365 work. You go to their websites and they provide you with a bento box container of storage space to hold your documents and access to the applications you need to make and update them all from your internet browser. In Office 365, you can use your own local storage.
I can hear you asking, "why did we do this when we already had servers running our applications and websites"? The virtual nature of the cloud is where cloud computing gets its key benefits.
Let's go back to our black Friday performance needs example for a second. That is a day of much higher than normal needs as far as horsepower and other resources are concerned. If you are using traditional physical servers then you must have, and pay for, a server capable of handling that peak performance all year around. In the cloud, you can turn on and off or increase and decrease resources for your virtual servers as needed with a mouse click or two. You can add and remove duplicate container [virtual] servers just as easily! Remember, they're only software.
That is just one way that cloud computing lowers costs and risk for businesses. These benefits help business owners sleep better at night because it makes their businesses future ready.
TMH Solutions specializes in cloud migration and cloud application development, we would love to discuss your company's vision and how we can help make that future ready so you can sleep better at night too.