For decades the scalability and the OPEX cost were a challenge for companies so the magic solution showed up which is the “Cloud”, so what is the “Cloud”? Cloud is the on-demand delivery of services such as compute, storage, database, networking, etc with the ability to scale in the fly and without upfront cost.
Cloud services benefit businesses from multiple perspectives and in different ways:

### Scalability

Having a system which can scale up and down, scale in and out based on traffic trends is crucial to ensure a business success. If there is no other benefit of Cloud except this One then it should be more than sufficient to showcase the huge impact of the cloud on the industry. With Cloud system you can add more resources horizontally by adding procuring more servers or vertically by expanding the resources (memory, Disk space, processor, etc).

### Fault Tolerance

The ability for a system to remain operational even if some of the components used to build it fail is very important for applications to make sure the continuity of BAU (1) activities and improve the customer experience.

### High Availability

Minimizing the service downtime is One of the greatest benefits of the Cloud services, in new industries having the data accessible and available with the maximum reduced time that can be achieved is a must.

### Disaster Recovery

Issues and outages can anyway happen whatever the precautions we make in place but the ability to recover the data, configurations and settings is primordial for business applications.

### Capital-Expenditure Free

the CAPEX(2) was always the first challenge for users to kick off new projects, now with the ability to pay as go and the elimination of the upfront costs this becomes way less challenging.

### Document and Version Control

Storing multiple versions of the same data and building applications up using multiple code versions is possible now with the ability to keep multiple historical versions. This also give users access to easy and fast rollback to a specific version in time.

### Agility

The rapid provisioning of resources and services in the cloud is cool feature of the Cloud. Users now can spin up computing, storage, database and other services in minutes from scratch without the need to go through procurement, installation and data center activities.

### Security

Data is the new fuel; it should be kept security at rest and in transit. Cloud gives a lot of options to encrypt data, secure it, authenticate users, protect from vulnerabilities and make sure being compliant.

### Automation

Automation helps on reducing the LOE (3) in code deployments, infrastructure and patching as well as increasing efficiency and TTM (4). Cloud gives the ability to automate activity via templates with the technology IAAC (5) especially for large distributed systems and large data centers.

### Orchestration

Defining a coordination, governance and control layer is a must when running highly distributed systems from APIs, infrastructure and logic standpoint. Cloud provides a variety tools for orchestration and at different levels.

Both private and public Cloud are rich in term of features to satisfy industries needs and now with the new technologies like IoT(6), Bots, AR/VR(7), Blockchain, 5G(8), etc the move to the cloud is primordial for businesses.

1. Business As Usual.
2. Capital Expenditure.
3. Level Of Efforts.
4. Time To Market.
5. Infrastructure As A Code.
6. Internet Of Things.
7. Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality.
8. Fifth Generation in Telco.


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