Effects of Digitization on Companies : Part VII

This article is continuation of part VI. In the course of digitization, there is no chance of avoiding the topic of IT infrastructure. All technical applications, services or solutions are based on infrastructure. As a company, you have to decide how many resources you need and what you are willing to pay for them. The industry and the company’s strategy play a major role here.

The simplest method is internal hosting. As the name implies, with such solutions the data centre is in-house and operated by our employees. The advantage is that no data is given outside and that there is a high connection speed. On the other hand, setting up your own data centre is very expensive and time-consuming. Also, you are responsible for maintaining the servers and systems, as well as their availability. Due to the high costs, however, only a few companies opt for their data centre, as the security of customer data is important to them.

But recently, cloud computing has become increasingly popular as a hosting solution for companies. In most cases, the cloud infrastructure is provided by an external service provider. Since the service provider is now responsible for maintaining the servers and any applications, the company can save resources at this point and use them elsewhere.

Another possibility is to set up your own, small cloud infrastructure for your own company. This offers all the advantages of a conventional cloud, but is only accessible for your own company and is therefore comparatively expensive to operate.

The third option combines the internal with the external cloud. These so-called hybrid models ensure that confidential data remains within the company while data is made available to the public in the form of websites.

With the cloud solution, you can switch on computing power, storage capacity or entire servers at the push of a button and within a very short time. This ensures that applications do not consume too many resources. The concept also saves a lot of time. Instead of ordering, configuring and setting up a physical server, a virtual server is made available within a very short time. This concept of virtualization and the availability of servers on demand is called Infrastructure as a Service, often also called IaaS . With IaaS, the user has control over the applications and storage space that should be available, but the physical infrastructure of the cloud is managed by the respective service provider. This ensures that the user has to worry about less and thus has less work. It is becoming more and more popular these days to offer products as services instead of goods. This trend is very well represented by the acronym XaaS, Anything as a Service. In addition to IaaS, there is now such an abbreviation for every service that can be offered with the help of cloud computing.
Another form of XaaS is Platform as a Service, PaaS for short. Here, the customer is provided with an environment that he can use for software development. This has the advantage that the environment can be accessed directly with the right infrastructure. The user accesses the libraries and resources of the service provider installed on his platform. At the same time, the end-user has no control over everything that goes beyond developing and running his applications. The maintenance of the hardware and software, as well as user administration, is completely the responsibility of the service provider and the user doesn’t have to worry about it. Nevertheless, the user has options to make certain adjustments.
It is much better known Software as a Service System (SaaS). The end-user has access to programs or software that are not installed on his computer via a web interface, for example. These programs are installed in the cloud and the user can access them in a variety of ways. It does not matter whether you access the cloud system via the command line or the web interface. This means that this program can be accessed from anywhere and the user, whether private or business, has to take care of the software, as it is managed by the service provider.

In the course of digitization, cloud computing offers many advantages due to its flexibility and speed. Since companies are working with more and more data, it is important that the IT infrastructure can be optimally adapted to the needs of the company. The cloud system also has many advantages for users. Documents and applications that are in the cloud can be easily accessed from anywhere. This allows employees to work together on projects without being physically in the same place. The basis for this should always be a very good security concept. Security policies contain rules and specifications as to which user group is allowed to access which system and when. Such regulations are particularly important if you have your cloud system hosted by an external provider. Continued in next part.