Top 7 Most Common Uses of Cloud Computing

Cloud

August 1, 2022
By IBM Cloud Team
5 min read

What are some of the most effective ways to

use cloud computing to achieve business
goals?

Cloud computing has been credited with increasing competitiveness through cost
savings, greater flexibility, elasticity and optimal resource utilization. As a technology,
cloud computing is much more than the sum of its parts. It opens doors to cloud-native
technologies, supports more efficient ways of working and enables emerging
capabilities in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).

Here’s how organizations are putting cloud computing to work to drive business value.
1. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) delivers fundamental compute, network and storage
resources to consumers on-demand, over the Internet and on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Using cloud infrastructure on a pay-per-use scheme enables companies to save on the
costs of acquiring, managing and maintaining their own IT infrastructure. Plus, the
cloud is easily accessible. Most major cloud service providers — including Amazon Web
Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure — offer IaaS with their
cloud computing services.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provides customers a complete cloud platform —

hardware, software and infrastructure — for developing, running and managing
applications without the cost, complexity and inflexibility of building and maintaining
that platform on-premises. Organizations may turn to PaaS for the same reasons they
look to IaaS; they want to increase the speed of development on a ready-to-use
platform and deploy applications with a predictable and cost-effective pricing model.

2. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
While Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is similar to the IaaS and PaaS uses described
above, it actually deserves its own mention for the undeniable change this model has
brought about in the way companies use software. SaaS offers software access online
via a subscription, rather than IT teams having to buy and install it on individual
systems.

SaaS providers, like Salesforce, enable software access anywhere, anytime, as long as
there’s an Internet connection. These tools have opened access to more advanced tools
and capabilities, like automation, optimized workflows and collaboration in real-time in
various locations.

3. Hybrid cloud and multicloud

Hybrid cloud is a computing environment that connects a company’s on-premises
private cloud services and third-party public cloud services into a single, flexible
infrastructure for running critical applications and workloads. This unique mix of public
and private cloud resources makes it easier to select the optimal cloud for each
application or workload and then move the workloads freely between the two clouds as
circumstances change. With a hybrid cloud infrastructure, technical and business
objectives are fulfilled more effectively and cost-efficiently than could be achieved with
a public or private cloud alone.

The video “Hybrid Cloud Explained” provides a more in-depth discussion of the
computing environment:
 Hybrid Cloud Explained

0:00 / 6:35 1x

Multicloud takes things a step further and allows organizations to use two or more
clouds from different cloud providers. This type of cloud computing can include any mix
of IaaS, PaaS or SaaS resources. With multicloud, workloads can be run in different
cloud environments to match unique needs. This also means that companies can avoid
vendor lock-in.

To learn more about how these options compare, see “Distributed Cloud vs. Hybrid
Cloud vs. Multicloud vs. Edge Computing.”

4. Test and development

One of the best use cases for the cloud is a

software development environment. DevOps
teams can quickly spin up development,
testing and production environments tailored
for specific needs. This can include, but is
not limited to, automated provisioning of
physical and virtual machines.

To perform testing and development in-

house, organizations must secure a budget
and set up the testing environment with
physical assets. Then comes the installation
and configuration of development platform.
All this can often extend the time it takes for
a project to be completed and stretch out the
milestones. Cloud computing speeds up this
process with cloud-based development tools
that make creating apps and software faster,
easier and more cost-effective.

One of the top benefits of cloud computing is

how it facilitates the DevOps process, CI/CD
pipelines, and cloud-native advancements
(e.g., microservices, serverless and
containerization). These technologies have
led to rapid acceleration and innovation, but
also require a self-sustaining cloud
infrastructure to support the hundreds of
services.

5. Big data analytics

By leveraging the computing power of cloud

computing, companies can gain powerful
insights and optimize business processes
through big data analytics.

There is a massive amount of data collected

each day from corporate endpoints, cloud
applications and the users who interact with
them. Cloud computing allows organizations
to tap into vast quantities of both structured
and unstructured data available to harness
the benefit of extracting business value.
Retailers and suppliers are now extracting
information derived from consumers’ buying
patterns to target their advertising and
marketing campaigns to a particular
segment of the population. Social
networking platforms are providing the basis
for analytics on behavioral patterns that
organizations are using to derive meaningful
information. Businesses like these and more
are also able to harness deeper insights
through machine learning (ML) and artificial
intelligence (AI), two capabilities made
possible with cloud computing.
Learn more about the intricacies of these technologies by reading “AI vs. Machine
Learning vs. Deep Learning vs. Neural Networks.”

6. Cloud storage
Cloud data storage enables files to be automatically saved to the cloud, and then they
can be accessed, stored and retrieved from any device with an Internet connection.
Rather than maintaining their own data centers for storage, organizations can only pay
for the amount of cloud storage they are actually consuming and do so without the
worries of overseeing the daily maintenance of the storage infrastructure. The result is
higher availability, speed, scalability and security for the data storage environment.

In situations where regulations and concerns about sensitive data are at play,
organizations can store data either on- or off-premises, in a private or hybrid cloud
model, for added security.

7. Disaster recovery and data backup

Yet another benefit derived from using cloud is the cost-effectiveness of a disaster
recovery (DR) solution that provides for faster recovery from a mesh of different
physical locations at a much lower cost than a traditional DR site.

Building a DR site and testing a business continuity plan can be an extremely expensive
and time-consuming task with fixed assets. When built in the cloud, however,
organizations can replicate their production site and constantly replicate data and
configuration settings, saving considerable time and resources.
Similarly, backing up data has always been a complex and time-consuming operation.
Cloud-based backup, while not being the panacea, is certainly a far cry from what it
used to be. Organizations can now automatically dispatch data to any location with the
assurance that neither security, availability, nor capacity are issues.

While these top seven uses of cloud computing are not exhaustive, it shows the clear
incentives for using the cloud to increase IT infrastructure flexibility, while also making
the most of big data analytics, mobile computing and emerging technologies.

IBM Cloud
IBM Cloud offers the most open and secure public cloud platform for business, a next-
generation hybrid multicloud platform, advanced data and AI capabilities, and deep
enterprise expertise across 20 industries. IBM Cloud hybrid cloud solutions deliver
flexibility and portability for both applications and data. Linux®, Kubernetes and
containers support this hybrid cloud stack, and they combine with RedHat® OpenShift®
to create a common platform connecting on-premises and cloud resources.

Learn how IBM Cloud solutions can help your organization with the following:

• Build and scale cloud-native applications

• Migrate existing on-premises workloads to the cloud

• Speed software and services delivery with DevOps

• Integrate applications and data across multiple clouds

• Accelerate your journey to artificial intelligence

• Leverage 5G and edge computing

To get started, sign up for an IBM ID and create your IBM Cloud account.

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IBM Cloud Team

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