What is cloud computing?
Technology moves to the cloud. This is not a temporary trend - the transition from traditional software deployment models to the Internet has been accelerating over the last 10 years. Looking ahead, the next decade of cloud computing will create new ways to collaborate all over the world, through mobile devices.
So what is cloud computing? Cloud computing is a type of outsourcing of computer programs. By using cloud computing, users get access to software and applications from anywhere, instead of keeping it on their servers. In the cloud, computer programs are hosted by the licensor. This means users do not have to worry about things like storage, power, cooling, disaster recovery, and backups - they can just enjoy their applications.
Before the cloud
Traditional business applications have always been very complex and expensive, due to the amount and variety of hardware and software required to run them. It required a whole team of experts to install, configure, parameterize, test, run, secure and update them.
It is easy to guess why the biggest IT companies do not maintain the applications they need on their own, the number of which goes into tens or hundreds. Small and medium-sized companies do not even have a chance to use software of a similar class in a traditional model.
Cloud computing
Cloud computing eliminates the inconvenience that comes with storing your own data because it takes away the burden of managing your hardware and software - it becomes the responsibility of an experienced provider. Just register to the cloud service via your web browser, adjust the parameters and start using your own, separate piece of resources.
Software as a Service
SaaS is one type of cloud (others include IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service or PaaS - Platform as a Service). In this case, the recipients of the service use software that is formally a product, but in practice - a service, paying for access instead of ownership. SaaS applications are mostly used via a browser and/or mobile applications.
The popularity of the cloud
As cloud computing becomes more and more popular, dozens of companies are moving their products and services to the cloud, by selling them as a "cloud version" - just to mention the Microsoft Office suite, graphic software Adobe Photoshop, or Polish accounting software Sage Symfonia.
Often, however, programs presented as "cloud" are in fact simply web applications, based on a cloud computing only metaphorically. Fortunately, many manufacturers go further, implementing their solutions in recognised and proven cloud-computing environments such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Mantreo in the cloud
Mantreo has been created and maintained in the Amazon cloud computing (AWS), which comes with numerous benefits, both for our IT team and for users:
- we are able to react quickly to changing business needs, matching technology to solutions, not the other way around,
- we have direct access to the latest technologies (e.g. machine learning, artificial intelligence, big data, natural language processing, etc.),
- we have unlimited, secure, and low price storage space for our users' data,
- we offer high level of service availability by eliminating possible single points of failure, using dynamically scaled redundancy of services and data,
- we offer full, automatic and encrypted data backups,
- we provide high level of security - both physically and logically,
- we provide encryption of all data stored in the system and connections between them (architecture AWS is GDPR compliant),
- we can react immediately in emergency situations (monitoring detects and alerts in any unusual situations).
