(Photo credit: IvanWalsh.com)

Cloud computing is truly the tech du jour among business enterprises, but this tech buzz word is no passing fad, its gearing up to be that floating behemoth of data that’s here to stay. You’d be surprise to know that you’ve been using cloud-based services for quite some time now with Gmail, Google Docs and Dropbox. And with that realization, do you now understand the convenience of the Cloud?

As more company data and materials go on the cloud and away from any physical server at the office,

you can count on productivity and customer service to get a boost, as data can be accessed on demand

and traded among shared groups and even further improved on through customization. Well, you can think of Cloud computing in terms of the way a busy airport operates and with it comes its very own 4Cs- Capacity, Continuity, Checkpoints and Chokepoints.

Capacity
Airports are adequately designed to cope with an onslaught of passengers and cargo at any given time. The same can be said of Cloud servers. There’s great planning and architecture involved in building an application on the cloud. Though most cloud-based systems don’t usually reside in one giant resource pool, it’s actually spread across remote sites such as public clouds and internal mini clouds, but when pulled together they form a customized, finely-tuned business application that can even be release within a company’s very own firewall. Cloud-based servers can provide common access to tons of critical data and sync content across multiple platforms, making workflows a whole lot easier.

Chokepoints
Air traffic controllers direct the flow and clearances of aircrafts making sure they stay apart at safe distances. The Cloud has the same kind of controlled environment, open to monitoring vulnerable spots and filtering user groups, only letting the necessary data and services run freely.

Continuity
Regardless of the weather or any natural disaster, an airport’s facilities keep their services open for travellers. Nothing slows down, business goes on, this is what happens in the cloud when disaster strikes and data recovery is set into play. The cloud enables companies to restore their data in less than a day or in just a matter of hours, critical data can be accessed via any portable device from any remote site. So in case of a natural disaster like fires and floods, or hardware failure or even a virus attack, a quick recovery strategy is feasible, business operations need not go down.

Checkpoints
Traditional infrastructure security measures may not hold the fort well enough with Cloud servers,

but security has always been a given concern with any virtual environment. But that doesn’t mean you

can’t add an extra layer of protection and beef up security on the Cloud, you can deploy specific security measures across your network to expose threats and inspect moving traffic. It may be a challenge, but the Cloud can weed out viruses and spam to counter distributed denial of service attacks attempting to shut down any key servers.

The author is a Cloud migration advocate who thinks ProfitBricks dedicated virtual server hosting is a good starting point to scale up.