Third-party cloud solutions

With so many companies now providing their applications/services hosted in cloud, enterprises needing them could use these as is and not worry about maintaining and managing on-premises infrastructure. These products, just by being on the cloud, provide enterprises with huge incentives with regard to how they charge for these services.

Due to this benefit, enterprises favorably choose these cloud products, and due to its mere nature, the enterprises now save their data (very specific to their business)in the cloud on someone else infrastructure, with the cloud provider having full control on how these data live in there.

Google BigQuery is one such piece of software, which, as a service product, allows us to export the enterprise data to their cloud, running this software for various kinds of analysis work. The good thing about these products is that after the analysis, we can decide on whether to keep this data for future use or just discard it. Due to the elastic (ability to expand and contract at will, with regard to hardware in this case) nature of cloud, you can very well ask for a big machine if your analysis is complex, and after use, you can just discard or reduce these servers back to their old configuration.

Due to this nature, Google BigQuery calls itself anEnterprise Cloud Data Warehouse, and it does stay true to its promise. It gives speed and scale to enterprises along with the important security, reliability, and availability. It also gives integration with other similar software products again in cloud for various other needs.

Google BigQuery is just one example; there are other similar software available in cloud with varying degrees of features. Enterprises nowadays need to do many things quickly, and they don't want to spend time doing research on this and hosting these in their own infrastructure due to various overheads; these solutions give all they want without much trouble and at a very handy price tag.

The list of such solutions at this stage is ever growing, and I don't think that naming these is required. So we picked BigQuery as an example to explain this very nature.

Similar to software as a service available in the cloud, there are many business applications available in cloud as services. One such example is Salesforce. Basically, Salesforce is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, but it does have many packaged features in it. It's not a sales pitch, but I just want to give some very important features such business applications in cloud bring to the enterprise. Salesforce brings all the customer information together and allows enterprises to build a customer-centric business model from sales, business analysis, and customer service.

Being in cloud, it also brings many of the features that software as a service in cloud brings.

Because of the ever-increasing impact of cloud on enterprises, a good amount of enterprise data now lives on the Internet (in cloud), obviously taking care of privacy and other common features an enterprise data should comply with to safeguard enterprise’s business objectives.