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Education

What exactly is 'the cloud'

or 'cloud computing'?

any advancement, pave and streamline the way for new
products and new thinking. Indeed, increased adoption
of cloud and virtual computing is having a major impact
on the payments industry. Traditional roles are beginning
to change as it becomes harder to keep up with the raw
computing power of the cloud.
This is becoming an issue not only for older companies,
but also for all businesses managing the flow of money.
It may be cheaper to deploy products and services in the
cloud, but to be 100 percent cloud based, companies would
have to transition all of their systems to the cloud. Even in
a hybrid situation, you're going to be limited by what you
have stored on physical servers if you are server based.
Why cloud computing matters

Cloud computing offers many benefits. Described below
are some of the advantages, along with a discussion of
By: Nicholas P. Cucci why this shift matters:
Fluid Pay LLC • Cost: This is a simple one. Cloud computing enables

ur industry, which is part of the tech industry, services like Amazon Web Services and Google
is no different than any other. We like to use Compute Engine to lease out machines (virtual
buzzwords or terms that sometimes don't machines) as needed. No more rack space, power,
O clearly convey to consumers what they actu- air conditioning and maintenance. Companies can
ally mean. For example, "the cloud." What does it mean grow and scale as needed without data center limi-
when you say your data is stored in the cloud? And what tations.
are the benefits or lack thereof?
And the money shift is another aspect of cost. This
When tech companies say your data is in the cloud, or is where you will see a major change. Companies,
that you can work in the cloud, it means that instead of understandably, want to shift from capital expendi-
being stored locally on your own device or computer, your ture (CAPEX) to operational expenditure (OPEX).
data is now stored on offsite servers that can be accessed
quickly and easily through web browsers like Chrome Basically, this means that companies are trying to
and Safari. reduce costs by buying computing power instead of
purchasing computer hardware, which they know
The cloud is not necessarily new architecture or will fail or break at some point. Letting the burden
methodology; it is more a way of accessing complete of maintenance fall on the computing company re-
applications across any device with an Internet connection. duces overall operational costs. Another aspect to
This is what allows you to "store" music in your app, save consider is the fact that most companies are strongly
project documents at any point, and later return to them underutilizing their current datacenter setup any-
where you left off, and on a different device, or even way.
collaborate with others on those same documents.
• Availability: Using a cloud-based service provides
Cloud computing has been around for a while (for about high availability and bundled pricing while also
the last 10 years) but has only recently started to become offering many other infrastructure solutions. This
adopted by large corporations that now realize the makes it much easier to integrate to or even have
potential of cloud computing. This will continue to be a redundant data backups in multiple Internet grids.
trend in the near future. However, large companies are For instance, instead of large payments companies
facing problems associated with their hosted data center having to host in multiple data centers on different
solutions while they migrate completely to the cloud. Internet grids, the company can spin up virtual ma-
As cloud technology gains more traction, it will, like chines in each grid using cloud systems like Google
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