Cloud-hosting sets up the pathway to remove platform barriers, achieve scalability and eliminate piracy

A predominantly digitized consumer interface and a digital operational framework have made the B2C domain data intensive. Add to that the aggressive adoption of data-driven technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) in various consumer engagement and social media applications across sectors such as e-commerce, BFSI (banking, financial services, and insurance), automobile.

The trend has intensified data exchanges (both private and generic) on those platforms. The responsibility of hosting such data exchange platforms securely and making those accessible universally rests with the companies which own them.

This includes responsibilities such as ascertaining the authenticity of the audience, the geo-location of the data exchanged, the nature of data, the relevance/criticality of the data, the storage requirements of such data, etc.

Taking a leaf out of Facebook

Let us look at Facebook. Facebook is accessible universally and is hosted securely in its private cloud. Had there not been cloud, Facebook would have faced many challenges while reaching out to a global audience. Being a worldwide hosting platform, cloud has helped Facebook geographically pan across regions so that users across the world can access it.

Overcoming platform barriers

Cloud adoption has benefited the global conglomerates functioning in the user-intensive and data-driven industry segments in the last decade or so in multiple ways.

First and foremost, cloud has eliminated multiple platform-related barriers by offering a round-the-clock available infrastructure that can scale to a global audience spread geographically with just one deployment. Added to that, auto-scaling capabilities to manage sudden rushes and downfalls in user access has made it truly scalable. Furthermore, the 'pay-as-you-go model' is cost-effective. The cloud-native tools while ensuring scalability have ensured security as well. Moreover, the competitive Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) segment has brought down the cloud infra pricing to make it affordable for corporations.

The cloud has been helping companies surpass all technical, business, regional, and language barriers of hosting to reach a global user base. Thanks to edge locations, high availability, and auto-scaling facilities, outages on such universal B2C or Software-as-a-service (SaaS) websites are now non-existent.

Facilitating nimble data storage and retrieval

When millions of users place their trust in the platform and share data, nimble data storage and retrieval become critical. Cloud addresses that aspect effectively by integrating effective technologies such as data lakes, data warehouses, database replications with clustering, data drivers, and more, so that there would be no data lost while millions of users access such applications concurrently. The data storage can be purchased through a 'pay-per-use model' which perfectly complements the need-based buying strategy of an organisation. Also, this model has done away with the need to set up local data storage for users. Applications are nowadays developed with the cloud in mind. All data that the users need to store or access are stored in the cloud servers by the applications.

Reducing data piracy

By deploying legitimate channels to host the application and databases, the cloud has reduced data piracy significantly. In the absence of cloud, companies would have to make do with on-premises versions of the enterprise software. It would have been a nightmare to control the piracy of such software. The scenario would have been akin to that of the 1990s when every software, even the enterprise ones, had a pirated copy.

The security threat to the platform has been significantly minimized thanks to the option to check the validity of the users. Ensuring non-exposure of source code by deploying the software directly in non-portable cloud AMIs and by selling these in cloud marketplaces authentically, the enterprises have reduced piracy to a great extent. This has also helped in improving their bottom lines.

Massive progress and growth in scale in technology deployment will help corporates host workloads and data servers in private and public clouds in a big way. Coupled with the native use of technology boosting security, the acceptance of cloud applications in user-intensive industries is set to grow further and cloud hosting will emerge as a de-facto standard for organizations, going forward.

Author: Raj Srinivasaraghavan - Chief Technology Officer at SecureKloud Technologies