It would help and answer few of the questions, if we go back to the basics to understand what is cloud computing.
Below are the official definition of Cloud Computing from the biggest providers in the world -
Microsoft Azure - “Simply put, cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. You typically pay only for cloud services you use, helping you lower your operating costs, run your infrastructure more efficiently, and scale as your business needs change. ”
AWS ( Amazon Web Services ) - “Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centres and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider. ”
GCP (Google Cloud Platform ) - “Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computing resources as services over the internet. It eliminates the need for enterprises to procure, configure, or manage resources themselves, and they only pay for what they use. ”
What Value Cloud Computing would provide ?
The official definitions from every cloud service provider may differ, however the cloud value proposition would remain the same, we can simply describe the value proposition of the cloud as below -
"Safe, secure access to highly available, reliable, and durable IT resources such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis with pay-as-you-go pricing"
To understand the cloud computing value proposition properly we need to look back into the history with an example.
Take example of the Industrial revolution which modernized manufacturing processes. However back then, businesses had their own generators to provide electricity. This was a great invention, but it took time to get the generators up and running. Ultimately, businesses were responsible for maintaining those pieces of equipment.
Dynamo powered, Diesel powered and Coal powered generators
When the power grid was developed, it allowed businesses to leverage the resources already procured by a company, and for a fee, gain access to the electricity as and when needed. This also allowed customers to access any additional enhancements or upgrades made to that power grid.
Now let’s fast forward to the 21st century when companies built their own data centres to run their businesses.
This required a large, upfront capital investment, a lengthy procurement cycle, and placed the responsibility of creating, running, and maintaining all the hardware and software for the business on a group of dedicated resources. As a result, businesses had a tough time keeping up with upgrades and introducing new functionality.
Introduction of cloud computing
Cloud computing allowed companies to host their mission-critical Applications, and special projects on the infrastructure built and maintained by a cloud provider. This allows companies to avoid large upfront hardware investments, and only pay for what they use, like a utility. Additionally, customers receive automatic functionality upgrades and access to a platform that has a lot of features.
What are the key values offered by the cloud ?
 Cost | Cloud makes it easy to scale up and down based on demand and removes the need for an on-premise data Centre to reduce costs. By using the pay as you go model, costs incurred can be monitored and reduced. |
 Agility | Applications can be developed and deployed globally across multiple geo locations within minutes. The speed of experimentation, development and deployment is exponentially higher compared to applications developed on in-house data centres. |
 Security and Compliance | Cloud offers multiple Security and Compliance services for various applications. It works on a Shared Responsibility Model, there are options for configuring extra security or have only default security, for example your applications can be made completely private with no access to outside world or internet and can also be setup to be available on the internet, if required too. |
 Flexibility with Innovation | Cloud offers multiple services for various applications. There are over 200+ products offered by each cloud providers to suit various application needs ranging from website hosting, microservices, containers, artificial intelligence, machine learning and Big Data. |
 Management and Monitoring | Cloud provides number of management reporting, monitoring and alerting capabilities, which can be configured as per your application and IT infrastructure needs, under a single plane for easy governance. |
 Elasticity with ease for IT resources | Applications can scale the IT resources as required for smooth operability based on the demand — Only provisions resources as and when the incoming demand fluctuates over a threshold for application's stable operation. |
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