What is cloud technology

What is cloud computing technology?

Cloud computing is the technology that enables us to share information, data, and applications across the Internet—offering faster innovation, more flexible resources, and a more scalable way of working.

The actual term ‘cloud computing’ is used to describe a global network of remote servers around the world which operates as a single ecosystem, each with a unique functionality. These functionalities include things such as storing and managing data, developing, running and testing applications, and delivering services and software to improve productivity—with the benefit of always having the information available at any time, and from any device.

Examples of cloud solutions include Google Gmail, cloud file storage like Dropbox, and streaming media like Netflix.

Although the cloud is no new technology, it is a relatively new way of doing business as organisations and companies can have their data stored in servers outside of their own offices, and hire third party vendors to do this work for them.

It is on-demand access to computing resources such as physical and virtual servers, applications, development tools, and more, via the internet. The services are hosted at a remote data centre, which is managed by a cloud service provider.

The term ‘cloud computing’ can also be used to describe the very technology that makes cloud computing work. This includes virtualised IT infrastructure (servers, networking, operating system software, and more) that, with the help of using special software, can be gathered and split independent of physical hardware boundaries.

With virtualisation, cloud providers can make maximum use of the data centre resources they have, and this cloud delivery model has been adopted by many organisations for maximum utilisation and cost savings.

Cloud computing software has become incredibly fast, secure, and efficient, and works for organisations of all sizes and industries.

Businesses transitioning to the cloud

The rise of cloud computing has meant that businesses no longer need to have their own in-house infrastructure but rather can outsource these services to third parties, which frees up time and resources, and makes it easier to scale up or down as business needs change.

In 2018, we surveyed some of our biggest markets to find out how many businesses had intentions of transitioning to the cloud (Link to survey in Norwegian). The results showed that, on average, up to 40% of prospects and 50% of Visma customers expected to deploy cloud software over the next two years.

One year later, in 2019, we saw that the actual adoption numbers already were above expectations—and this number has increased steadily over the last two years. With a pandemic forcing businesses to think differently about remote work, digitised processes, and new ways of delivering services and solutions, the cloud is more important than ever before.

The 2020 IDG Cloud Computing research, which looks at cloud usage and adoption plans, investments and more, found that 92% of the organisations included in the survey use cloud today.

Learn more about how you get started transitioning to the cloud.

What do businesses use the cloud for?

With the cloud comes many use cases and almost endless opportunities. For you as an individual, cloud means you can stream TV series and movies, listen to music, send emails, and edit documents together with your colleagues during work hours.

All businesses and organisations—from startups to large, global corporations and nonprofits—are benefiting from cloud computing for many different reasons. Here are some examples of what cloud computing is used for in organisations today:

Store, backup, and recovery of data

Businesses of all sizes, and you and me as individuals, can use cloud services to store, back up, share, and recover our data. This is what is typically known as Software as a Service (SaaS) and Backup as a Service (BaaS).

Disaster recovery is another important use case, as cloud provides a more cost-effective way to protect the company’s data against system failures. Cloud also helps to bridge the physical distance that is required to recover applications and data in case of a man-made or natural catastrophe.

Such disasters can be the result of a range of factors, for example a local power outage, human error, hardware failure—or natural disasters such as earthquakes, flood, winter weather and so on. Major interruptions like these might cause the organisation to lose customer data, or the website to go down. This is what is known as Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), which is something all of the major public cloud vendors offer.

Testing and development of software and applications

Cloud also provides better options for the development and testing of applications and software programs. Development teams adopting DevOps or Agile methods can make use of the cloud’s on-demand and self-service capabilities to streamline typical bottleneck tasks such as test servers.

Because a business can deploy technology services in only a matter of minutes, they can move from idea and development to test and implementation at a much faster pace than before.

By using cloud environments and infrastructure to simulate realistic user and traffic scenarios, businesses can also measure performance, security and functionality in a more efficient way.

This opens up new possibilities for experimentation, testing new ideas and launching new applications and products, that will ultimately transform the business.

Going digital with business-critical functions

More and more businesses are maintaining their operations remotely, and cloud software solutions are enabling this shift: the process of finding digital ways to solve business-critical functions.

This includes e-Commerce solutions that let brick-and-mortar stores move to virtual spaces; welfare technology solutions that allow nurses or school staff to spend more time with their patients and students than on administrative tasks; and workforce management solutions that make time tracking, payroll services, and employee scheduling, to mention a few, more efficient.

It also includes digital signature and digital invoicing. The signing of documents and the invoicing of customers are critical to any business, and with cloud solutions these processes are both faster and more convenient. By operating in the cloud, both customers and end users that are using such solutions can feel confident knowing their documents are secure.

By digitising business processes, tasks can be handled at any time from anywhere, by anyone who has access—at a lower cost.