The reason why Cloud is the new, ousting the old

Server performance has increased dramatically in recent years. It is no longer necessary to have a server or multiple servers for every application. Since today’s servers are so powerful, they can be partitioned into multiple logical servers in a physical server, reducing the need for so many servers. This reduces space, power, and cooling requirements. Additionally, virtualization makes it simple to move, add, or change server environments.

Previously, any time you wanted to make a server change, you had to buy a new server, which could take weeks or months, install the operating system and all the applications’ dependencies, and then find a time to upgrade the server when it wasn’t being used.

This process was lengthy, as changes to any part of an IT environment can affect many other systems and users. With virtualization, to upgrade a server, you must copy only the server file to another machine, and it’s up and running. Server virtualization became so critical in improving hardware resource utilization for computing that soon organizations explored moving the network to virtualized servers. Now routing, firewalling, and many other functions can be shifted to virtualized services with software-defined networking. For several years organizations have migrated their traditional data centers to virtualized enterprise data centers, and it has worked well. However, network speed (bandwidth) has made significant gains, while the cost of this high-performance networking has decreased substantially.

Therefore, it is now possible to move the data center to a cloud computing environment and still achieve high performance with lower total costs. With the ability to purchase multiple 10- gigabit-per-second links to AWS, it’s now feasible to connect an organization to a cloud provider at almost the same speed as if the application is in the local data center, but with the benefits of a cloud computing environment.