Cloud technology is slowly changing not only the workflows in the company but also the private lives of many people. Sharing information is easier in the cloud, as is accessing the company management system from different devices; there are many factors that are making the cloud an essential condition for every reality that wants to survive on the market.
In this short guide we will help companies and e-commerce to orient themselves in the panorama of cloud services starting from the technical bases of this type of data management: where is the software physically located, when we talk about cloud? What are you buying when you buy services on the market (for example: Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, or others)?
What do we mean when we talk about public, private and hybrid cloud?
But above all: can cloud computing also bring benefits to an e-commerce?

Software, platform or infrastructure

The first distinction to make is to consider how much autonomy your company will have in managing the cloud software it is purchasing. Remember that to make a software work, you need not only the software itself, but also a platform and an infrastructure.
On the market we will find:

• those who sell cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS - infrastructure as a service) - for example, Amazon Web Services EC2, but also Magento enterprise. Here the company has complete autonomy over backup, network and virtual machines, for example;
• who offers a platform (PaaS - platform as a service). In this case, a development environment is provided, and not just an infrastructure, which software developers then use to build applications or services. This category includes, for example, the services offered by Google App Engine, Salesforce, Amazon AWS Lambda, but also Parallels Plesk.
• who sells software directly (SaaS - software as a service) - for example, Google apps (Google Drive or Gmail) and Dropbox fall into this category. You get such software by purchasing a license or subscribing to a subscription.

Iaas, Paas or Saas: Which is More Advantageous?

The most widespread typology today is PaaS, although obviously each company has its own needs. Maintaining an IT infrastructure at your company can be expensive and energy-consuming, and certainly a small e-commerce has no interest in investing in this solution, and prefers instead to deal directly with a software-as-a-service, perhaps one that takes care of updates and security patches independently.
Those who have an IT department, however, can afford to reason differently.
A nice image we found on Bigcommerce.com explains well the diversity of autonomy that a company can have with Iaas, Paas and Saas, comparing it with the activity of managing a pizzeria.

Before the invention of cloud computing, business management software was “on premises”, that is, it was installed in the same physical location, for example an office, where the company was located.
Today, however, it is possible to have a good IT infrastructure or a good e-commerce by choosing to purchase only the software, and delegating to others the complex operations of management and maintenance of hosting, infrastructures and platforms.

Public, Private and Hybrid Cloud

Another important distinction is between public, private, and hybrid clouds, which overlap and combine with the three types mentioned above.

Public cloud

Initially, a public cloud was defined as any cloud service made available to multiple companies and which used hosting at the provider. Today it is more correct to speak only of the first characteristic (service available to multiple companies). tenant.), because public cloud providers have started offering some features on premises, and so it is no longer a question of “where” the hosting is located.
An example of a public cloud used by individuals is Dropbox, where a user can create a private account and upload their own photos and videos, keeping them in a space accessible only to them, although usable by many other people. For companies, a well-known example is IBM cloud.

Advantages and disadvantages

The main advantages of the public Cloud are easy scalability and cost: in fact, a provider with a high number of infrastructures is able to optimize costs and provide an efficient Cloud service to companies at a lower cost than a private Cloud.
Another advantage of the public cloud is that the company can delegate the management of security: a small business or e-commerce with limited IT resources can benefit from the superior security of a large cloud provider, without having to worry about cyber threats.
Finally, there is the aspect of reliability: public clouds are services distributed across multiple data centers, and are therefore less likely to fail when needed. Furthermore, they are accessible to company employees from any point, without the need to invest in secure connection infrastructures (Want to learn more? Find out how public clouds work? corporate vpn).
However, the cost of a public cloud generally increases as the company grows, making it a preferable solution for larger companies.

Private cloud

A private cloud instead requires that the same cloud hosting is used only by a company in its own data center or in its own corporate intranet. This implies that the security, maintenance and development of cloud computing are entrusted only to the company that chooses to purchase the private cloud service.
A private Cloud has nothing to envy to a public Cloud in terms of scalability and security (thanks to the use of firewalls and internal hosting), and is certainly a much more elastic solution than the old on premises.
The main problem with private Cloud may be the costs, which are generally higher: all expenses related to the Cloud will fall on the company.

Hybrid cloud

This is an interesting and constantly growing solution for companies, because it allows them to customize IT services according to their relevance, deciding to keep the hosting partly public and partly private.

Benefits of Hybrid Cloud

In addition to general cost savings, hybrid cloud has the great advantage of scalability and general versatility.
A company, especially if it operates in the digital sector or makes massive use of digital tools, must be able to constantly update itself, perhaps even just on a single aspect of its cloud. This is why the versatility offered by the hybrid cloud is increasingly being chosen by a greater number of companies.

Why Enterprises Prefer Hybrid Cloud

With a hybrid cloud, you can take advantage of the benefits of private and public clouds, balancing them to bridge the disadvantages.
In short, a hybrid cloud:

• It provides you with a data center;
• It allows you to migrate resources and workloads from private to public or vice versa, keeping them as two distinct entities;
• It allows you to keep financial information, or sensitive customer data, in a completely private section;
• It allows you to easily process corporate big data, which can be processed in the public cloud;
• It is as scalable and secure as a private cloud, but costs much less;
• In case of a spike in demand on the private cloud, non-sensitive data can be moved to the public one.

Cloud and e-commerce: when we talk about them together

Cloud computing is also very important for those who deal with e-commerce. For example, it is essential to make a regular cloud backup of your e-commerce, to avoid that the valuable data of sales, customers and products are damaged or lost.
Furthermore, a CMS how WordPress can benefit from many cloud services, such as cloud hosting to maximize site security, or data storage.
A WordPress site, for example, can be installed on Google cloud storage, just to name a common situation.

The most important aspect when talking about cloud is to understand that the virtualization of some services requires first the exact understanding of the technology that is going to be chosen, but above all it requires a preliminary analysis of what the company workloads are.

For this reason, a tailor-made digital consultancy is essential. The cloud is a complex technology that will accompany your company or your e-commerce for a long time, and to a certain extent it will also decide the practical functioning of your business.
Contact the Pizero Design team to make the right choice from the start!