How is Advanced Cloud Different from Regular Cloud?

CIO Applications| Thursday, August 27, 2020

Enterprise organizations often find the need to connect various departments, divisions, different headquarter locations, and a plethora of field personnel. This results in a highly fragmented cloud that spans multiple global locations.

Fremont, CA: Unlike the name suggests, cloud computing has nothing to do with the actual clouds. The technology gets its name from the curly cartoon circle that network engineers use to represent clouds of connected network resources. Cloud computing has taken over the world by storm. For both personal and business uses, the cloud has emerged as the preferred medium of storage. The increasing importance of global connectivity for businesses has made the cloud indispensable. However, not all cloud computing is built the same. They involve a combination of various network resources, tools, performance boosts, and optimizations that can be brought together to blend into the abstracted space that anyone particular cloud instance takes up on a server hard disk, in a data center or an on-premises environment.

As a result, cloud computing is mostly categorized as basic standard-issue clouds and advanced clouds. This may sound simple in theory, but can get complicated in some cases where some companies call themselves Advanced Cloud Services, by name, or use it to denote its services offered in the field. Enterprise organizations often find the need to connect various departments, divisions, different headquarter locations, and a plethora of field personnel. This results in a highly fragmented cloud that spans multiple global locations.

Naturally, highly fragmented clouds are not the best option for integration. They are also more complex to manage in ensuring that they are all patched for updates, cleaned for data de-duplication, and more. It is also harder to guarantee resiliency and uptime for fragmented clouds as they are strung out around various servers across different data centers. As a result, large scale businesses often rely on advanced cloud services, which are mostly virtual entities, whose final form is built upon a shared infrastructure. Virtual presence is a significant factor for clouds as it allows them to change their shape more quickly. Traditionally, cloud platforms are offered in unchangeable form, especially in the case of so-called reserved instances. Advanced clouds also eliminate upwards and downward scaling.

Advanced cloud is more of an à la carte menu, where the customer can have a little bit of this and a little bit of that, exactly how they like it served. If the advanced cloud were a lunch, it would mean having the freedom to have a side of organic tender stem broccoli plus the triple-cooked fries and the Bernaise sauce and extra Dijon mustard. In terms of cloud computing, advanced cloud means a company with offices A and B in Europe, and offices X, Y, and Z in North America will be able to access high-performance cloud services optimized for massive transactional data throughput and will also have additional data storage power, additional data analytics engine call capabilities, and increased memory performance.