What are the advantages of cloud computing over traditional IDC?

First of all, cloud computing is a relatively general statement, which can be roughly divided into IaaS, PaaS and SaaS according to business types. What can be compared with IDC is IaaS business, that is, infrastructure as a service. This includes virtualization of servers, storage and networks. I won't talk about specific dogmatic advantages here. From a practical point of view, let's talk about two main advantages of cloud computing over IDC:

First, flexible use: enterprises can expand or reduce the use scale of cloud computing services at any time as needed. For example, if an enterprise that purchases IaaS services deploys its own website, if the website traffic suddenly increases (for example, holding an activity leads to a surge in user visits), it can increase the CPU and bandwidth of the cloud server at any time, which is immediate; When the website traffic becomes smaller, it can reduce CPU and bandwidth and save costs. Traditional IDC can't meet such application scenarios in terms of technology or billing mode. This function is very, very critical. Because in the traditional IDC mode, many enterprises will design their own Internet business platforms according to greater redundancy, because the expansion cycle of IDC is too slow, which will lead some enterprises to purchase IDC products according to the configuration much higher than the current usage, which will greatly waste the cost of enterprises. With the cloud host, the expansion is very flexible and can be opened immediately, which can save a lot of costs for enterprises.

Second, scalability: At present, the mainstream cloud computing platform is expanding from IaaS to PaaS, that is, while providing basic host services, it introduces various additional services, such as databases, security, messages, logs and even artificial intelligence, big data analysis, and Internet of Things. Compared with pure IDC, this can greatly enhance the appeal to some high-end enterprise users. After all, the current Internet business is far from the static corporate websites or simple CMS or forums. Most enterprises with a certain scale need a large number of scientific and technological tools to exert their value, including artificial intelligence, big data analysis, Internet of Things, information security, etc., and these technologies are closely related to cloud computing. For example, artificial intelligence may rely on the computing power of cloud computing, big data analysis may rely on cloud storage, and data collected by the Internet of Things also needs to go to the cloud. Therefore, it is selfish and altruistic for the cloud platform to provide some universal extension capabilities. Many enterprises also like this one-stop service very much.