Almost all business sectors in today’s world involve online activity. The internet has invaded practically every aspect of daily life. Most people utilized the convenience of the world wide web weekly if not daily. Those who own or operate a business interest may find that the majority of managing and operating that organization is accomplished online. Establishing and maintaining a company’s online persona requires persistent web development work.

Whether it is a website, webpage or social media account, some form of web presence has become a near necessity in the conduct of commerce. As a result, web development is a function and responsibility that must be addressed. Early in the rapid growth of the internet, this equated to learning to translate a company’s value proposition into bits of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). By today’s standards, microprocessors and connections to the internet were painfully slow. All of that has changed.

There are multiple aspects of web development today. The customer-facing web presence element is only a fraction of the work involved. Back-end or back-office development work may constitute more activity than front-end. Cloud computing is becoming the norm of online business operations. Its ability to bring computing resources to bear on the tasks of enabling customer and employee functionality is a feature that was only dreamt of in earlier days of e-commerce. Now, cloud computing can constitute the entirety of a business model.

The Resource Advantage of Cloud Computing

The availability of massive processing power and storage is perhaps the greatest advantage of this approach to business computing. Previous iterations of business models faced the challenge of balancing budgetary constraints on the extent of in-house computing assets. The sometimes-erratic demands of maintaining a web presence made budgeting and acquisition of servers a guessing game. A single viral blog post can suddenly spike levels of traffic that exceed in-house capabilities. Cloud computing allows for the spin-up of enormous resources when needed. As demand wanes scaling down the needed resources and their expense addresses this challenge eloquently.

The Time Advantage of Cloud Computing

Instantaneous access to resources can be invaluable. Previous versions of in-house IT resource strategies required weeks if not months to implement. The downside cost of that limitation was painfully high.

The Security Advantage of Cloud Computing

Two different elements of a cloud computing model provide security advantages. First, having IT resources off-site reduces the risk of catastrophic losses due to fire or natural disaster. Secondly, the nature of server farms is to contain security threats by putting up extensive deterrents to cyber-attacks. Firewalls as well as physical site security add a significant peace-of-mind factor to IT operations.

These three advantages are only part of cloud computing’s strength. The ability to immediately relocate IT resources to a different physical location through back-ups at other server farms is another example.