Flexibility first: How your business can benefit from cloud elasticity
Cloud elasticity’ is the ability to scale your cloud infrastructure for a wide range of uses. Simply scale up when you need more power, and scale down when you don’t. The benefits are twofold: you reduce costs and increase efficiency.
One of the biggest challenges in cloud computing is keeping costs low while being able to scale quickly to meet demands. To make this happen, many companies are now employing a cloud elasticity strategy, meaning they’re allocating only the resources they need, with the ability to scale up or down as their needs change. Whether you need to add more resources for a project, or want to expand the backup capacity of your website, employing cloud elasticity gives you the flexibility to handle the change.
However, both over-provisioning and under-provisioning can be detrimental if selected incorrectly. Over-provisioning can lead to increased costs, whilst under-provisioning can result in system failure and critical losses.
More flexibility means more freedom to grow
Traditionally, whenever there was a workload spike, it meant you had to invest in more servers with increased storage and bandwidth. The good news with the cloud is that your infrastructure can scale up or down at any given moment, without the outlay and limitations of hardware. And as you don’t have to deal with physical infrastructure, IT support, and upgrades, you end up saving time, money and resources.
A cloud service that is flexible and scalable allows you to allocate resources and only pay for what you use. This is critical when it comes to knowing what needs to be backed up to avoid cybersecurity threats. Download our free ebook, ‘Cybersecurity: Smart threats need a smarter defence’, which helps you understand these threats and how to better safeguard against them.
Cloud elasticity can benefit your business
Performance that matches your needs
Flexible cloud providers offer a host of tools and plans that can accommodate your projects. Many premium providers also price their services on a pay-per-use model, meaning that you only pay for what you use. When it comes to scaling, it’s all about the right fit, so you need to make sure you choose the right cloud partner who can offer the perfectly laid out plan to prepare for increased use.
Seamless integration between scalability and elasticity
Cloud elasticity combines with scalability to enable customers and platforms to perform better. While scalability works better over the long term to keep your cloud costs under control, elasticity lets you handle present and future needs without much effort. Platforms benefit from elasticity in that they can keep customers happy and avoid potential system overload or excess spending.
Availability you can rely on
Cloud elasticity triggers new server provisions. This means your tools are always running, even when output spikes or unexpected problems occur. Businesses can access resources and data at any moment, without having to worry about the stability of their infrastructure.
Affordability that drives the growth of your business
The traditional on-premises model is inefficient. As businesses are no longer forced to purchase additional infrastructure, than they would normally use on a daily basis, the cost of creating and managing in the cloud can be significantly lower than the price of creating and maintaining those same applications on-premise.
Is cloud elasticity the solution for you?
Drawn by the appeal of flexibility, some businesses choose cloud elasticity to cut costs, others to maximise resources, and some simply because they can. Elasticity may be the perfect fit if your business:
- Values using a pay-as-you-go model for cloud services.
- Is concerned with potential overconsumption and underconsumption.
- Operates in an industry where high availability and uptime are crucial to operations.
Business benefit from cloud elasticity
As businesses come to understand the benefits of elasticity for their cloud applications and storage, demand and use continues to grow. This is exactly because it helps businesses build out responsive and agile applications, workloads and data with a guaranteed level of performance, availability and cost efficiency.
