Amazon, Netflix, Adobe- all are the prominent companies that are using and taking benefit from AWS for their computing and storage needs. AWS cloud computing model was launched way back in 2006 by Amazon Web Services (a subsidiary of Amazon) when no firm had even thought of providing such type of services but Amazon ventured on this risk with this blue-ocean strategy and now, on this day, Amazon is the market leader of the whole cloud computing market with almost 70% market share. So far, one can infer is that this new technology is flourishing and has been used by almost every firm, right from the startups to a few big 5 as well, but why is there so much hype in paying for the services to another company when one can have its own servers? WHY?

Let’s try to understand this with an example- Suppose I am in a partnership business of designing and launching an app called TRADERHELP – an online discount brokerage model for trading in stock markets. Suppose me and my associate have successfully designed it and decided to launch this application. So, the first thing we need to do is to invest some money in buying servers and once we have bought the servers, we will upload our TRADERHELP application on those servers so that they can cater to the needs of whatever user base TRADERHELP will generate in early few stages after launching it. Since the usage is less, my limited stack of servers will function effectively and efficiently but what if the demand exponentially surges in the market just in few days? Had it been gradually, I would have bought and increased my stack of servers accordingly (as per the expected rise in the usage of the app). On the contrary, servers are getting overburdened because of the traffic coming in this scenario and I don’t have any light in response to curb or deal with it. Hence, we will invest a good chunk of money this time to buy a huge stack of servers and now the green light is there and the situation has gone back to normal. But, traffic lights are machines, servers are machines. There will be times my server will go down and maybe, in this case, my initial stack of servers gets crashed because of overheating due to a huge inflow of traffic. What will we do this time? We need to hire a server maintenance team that will manage my servers. Again cost will be incurred!!! But what if there is a company that gives servers on rent and charges for the time for which the user has been done and the company also takes the full responsibility of maintaining servers, providing data protection, high speed, and allowing global access through its global presence (AWS has total 18 geographic regions with enormous data centers that provide universal access and reduce data latency as much as possible) and these are the reasons why a company inclines towards AWS cloud computing.

So, through this example, we can conclude the few bits of help provided by cloud technologies to solve some major problems that any future businesses and potential startups will face. Some of them are-

1. Lack of Budget
2. Restricted global access and Data Latency
3. Data Hacking
4. Low Speed