Scalability is the ability to increase the capacity of a system to meet increasing workloads in order to fully utilise available resources. Bigger workloads can be accommodated by either making the hardware stronger (scale up) or by adding additional nodes (scale out).
According to EvolveIP, “scalability is a planned level of capacity, with appropriate overhead, that you anticipate your company’s systems to require over time, in addition to the ability to scale in a quick and easy manner when (and if) you need more (or less) resources.”
The ability to scale on demand is among the key benefits of cloud computing, as the cloud is designed to enable resource growth and contraction to match demand through methods such as load balancing. For example, you may have 25 users on the cloud on a particular application or product. If you add 30 more users into it, the ability of the cloud to scale enables the system to perform the same way even when the resource is re-scaled.
This level of flexibility and agility was unheard of before the advent of the cloud and now, businesses are able to easily scale as and when required, and upgrade their infrastructure as new technologies are developed. The cloud environment makes things much simpler for the end user because the context changes from physical servers to virtual multi-tenant architecture. There’s no longer a need for server upgrades and resources, such as additional storage or bandwidth can be provided to the user instantly and transparently without any downtime.
The cloud, due to its flexibility and scalability, can provide organisations with new ways and opportunities to innovate and expand their business without the challenges and overhead of managing their own physical infrastructure. While they migrate workloads to a public-cloud environment, they have to manage and secure a hybrid infrastructure – and this prospect may be the reason some companies are hesitant to get started.
To help businesses in their cloud journey, companies like Barracuda offer security products and services that are engineered to ease their transition and provide the enhanced security they need in their new cloud infrastructure. Even as their business needs and cloud requirements grow, Barracuda’s offerings are able to extend seamless security across both on-premises and cloud-hosted environments – giving enterprises single-point visibility and control over their entire security infrastructure.
Moving from physical to virtual, since the number of servers that a company can provision is no longer bound by the physical size of their server closet, cloud computing has also unlocked a whole new way for businesses to scale their architecture. For more information, click here.
