Cloud computing its Benefits, Characteristics and Types in 2025

Introduction 

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services including server, storage, databases, networking and software-over the internet. It allows user to access these resources on demand, paying only for what they use, rather than investing in and maintaining their own physical infrastructure. This provides flexibility, scalability and cost saving for businesses and individual. Cloud computing is pivotal in our everyday lives, whether that means to access a cloud application, such as Google Gmail. Cloud computing has also become indispensable in business settings from small startups to global enterprises. It provides the vast computing power.

Benefits of cloud computing

Cloud computing offers many benefits, including:

Cost-effectiveness

Increased speed and agility

Unlimited scalability

Enhanced strategic value

Cost-effectiveness

Cloud computing lets you offload some or all the expenses and effort for purchasing, installing, configuring and managing mainframe computers and other on premises infrastructure. You can pay for cloud-based infrastructure and other computing resources as you use them.

Increased speed and agility

With cloud technologies, your organization can use enterprise applications in minutes instead of waiting weeks or months for IT to respond to a request purchase and configure supporting hardware and install software. This feature empower users and others developments team to help use cloud-based software and support infrastructure.

Unlimited scalability

Cloud computing provides elasticity and self-service provisioning, so instead of purchasing excess capacity that sits unused during slow periods, you can scale capacity up and down in response to spikes and dips in traffic. You can also use your cloud provider’s global network to spread your applications closers to users worldwide.

Enhanced strategic value

Cloud computing enables organizations to use various technologies and the most up-to-date innovations to gain a competitive edge. For instance, in retail, banking and others customer facing industry, generative AI-powered virtual agents deployed over the cloud can deliver better customer response time and free up teams to focus on higher-level work. In manufacturing, teams can collaborate and use cloud-based software to monitor real-time data across logistics and supply chain processes.

Characteristics of cloud computing

There are many characteristics of cloud computing here are few of them:

Rapid elasticity

The computing services should have IT resources that are able to scale out and in quickly on a need basis. Whenever, the users require services it is provided to him and it is scale out as soon as its requirements get over.

Measured service

The resource utilization is tracked for each application and occupant; it will provide both the user and the resource provider with an account of what has been used. This is done for various reasons like monitoring billing and effective use of resource.

Sustainability

Clouds providers are increasingly focused on sustainable practices, such as energy efficient data centers and the use of renewable energy sources to reduce their environment impact.

Resource pooling

The IT resource (e.g. network, storage, applications and services) present are shared across multiple applications and occupant in an uncommitted manner. Multiples clients are provided service from a same physical resource.

Resilient computing

Cloud computing services are typically designed with redundancy and fault tolerance in mind, which ensures high availability and reliability.

Types of cloud computing

The following are the types of cloud computing is also known as cloud development models as follow:

Public cloud

Private cloud

Community cloud

Hybrid cloud

Multi cloud

Public cloud

Public cloud are managed by third-parties which provides cloud services over the internet to the public, these services are available as pay-as-you billing models. They offer solutions for minimizing IT infrastructure cost and become a good option for handling peak loads on the local infrastructure. Public cloud is the go to option for small enterprises, which can start their business without large upfront investments by completely relying on public infrastructure for their IT needs. The fundamental characteristics of public clouds are multi-tenancy. A public cloud is meant to serve multiples users, not a single customers. A user requires a virtual computing environment that is separated, and most likely isolated, from other users. For example, Amazon EC2, IBM and GCP.

Advantages of public cloud

·   Public cloud is easy to scale up and down resources as per the demand of traffic and work load. It facilitates with the performance optimization and cost efficiency.

    It works on as pay-as-you cloud models and helps in resolving the investments needs in hardware and infrastructure reducing overall costs.

Disadvantages of public cloud

·       It is difficult to trust and maintain data to a third-party provider may raise concerns about control and ownership.

    Public cloud comes with limited transparency, about the underline infrastructure which may take it challenging to monitor and manage performance effectively.

Private cloud

Private clouds are distributed systems that work on private infrastructure and provide the users with dynamic provisioning computing resources. Instead of pay-as-you go model in private clouds, there could be others schemes that manage the usage of the cloud and proportionally billings of the different departments.  Private cloud providers are HP data centers, elastics-private cloud, Microsoft etc. For example, Openstack, Dell cloud solutions, VMware, vCloud suite.

Advantages of private cloud

·       In the private cloud security, concerns are less since customer data and other sensitive information do not flow of private infrastructure.

·       Private cloud provides specific operations such as clustering, data replication, system monitoring and uptime services.

Disadvantages of private cloud

·       Private cloud is accessible within a particular area. So the area is accessibility is restricted.

·       In the private cloud security concerns, are less since customer’s data and other sensitive information do not flow out of private infrastructure. Hence, skilled peoples are required to manage and operate cloud services.

Community cloud

Community clouds are distributed systems created by integrating the services of different cloud to address the specific needs of an industry. In the community cloud, the infrastructure is shared between organizations that have shared concerns. An organization may manage the cloud. For example, Nextcloud, Cloudsigma, Owncloud.

Advantages of community cloud

·       Entire cloud is shared by numerous enterprises or a community, community cloud are cost-effective. Public cloud is less secure than community cloud.

·       Thanks to community cloud, we may share cloud resources, infrastructure and other capabilities between different enterprises.

Disadvantages of community cloud

·       Gradual adoption of data

·       It is challenging for corporations to share duties.

·       Not all business should choose community cloud.

Hybrid cloud

A hybrid cloud is a heterogeneous distributed system formed by combining facilities of the public cloud and the private cloud. For this reason, they are also called heterogeneous cloud. A major drawback of private deployments is the inability to scale-on-demand and efficiently addresses peak loads. Here public clouds are needed. Hence, a hybrid cloud takes advantage of both public and private clouds. For example, Azure Stack, Google Anthos, IBM Cloud Satellite.

Advantages of hybrid cloud

  Hybrid cloud is available at a cheap cost than other clouds because it is formed by a distributed system.

  It works comes up with working fast with lower cost and facilitates in reducing the latency of the data transfer process.

Disadvantages of hybrid cloud

  It is possible that businesses lack the internal knowledge necessary to create such a hybrid environment. Managing security may also be more challenging. Different access levels and security considerations may apply in each environment.

   Managing a hybrid cloud may be more difficult. With all of the alternative and choices available today, not to mention the new PaaS components and technologies that will be released every day going forward, public cloud and migration to public cloud are already complicated enough. It could just feel like a step too far to include hybrid.

Multi-cloud

Multi-cloud is the use of multiple cloud computing services from different providers, which allows organizations to use the best suited services for their specific needs and avoid vendor lock in. This allows organizations to take advantage for different features and capabilities offered by different cloud providers. For example, Cloud Foundry, Red Hat OpenShift, Docker Swarm.

Advantages of Multi-cloud

·       By distributing workloads across multiple cloud providers, organizations can improve the performance and availability for their applications and services.

·       Using multiple cloud providers, allows organizations to choose the best suited services for their specific needs and avoid vendor lock in.

Disadvantages of Multi-cloud

·       The cost of managing multiple cloud providers and services can be higher than using a single provider.

·       Different cloud providers may not be able to interoperate seamlessly, which can limit the ability to move data and applications between them.

Conclusion

Cloud computing is a new frontier that we have yet to fully explore and develop. It is a new era in computer technology that will dictate the future of computer use. Cloud computing makes very easy for companies to provides their products with end users without worrying about   hardware configurations and others requirements of servers. Cloud computing will continue to grow and expand as well as the need and demand for the types of the services. Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computing resources such as storage and infrastructure, as services over the internet. Cloud computing gives your business more flexibility.