What are the goals of Cloud Computing?

Reduced Spending on Technology Infrastructure: Moving to cloud computing may reduce the cost of managing and maintaining your IT systems. Rather than purchasing expensive systems and equipment for your business, you can reduce your costs by using the resources of your cloud computing service provider. You may be able to reduce your operating costs because

• the cost of system upgrades, new hardware and software may be included in your contract
• you no longer need to pay wages for expert staff 
• your energy consumption costs may be reduced 
• There are fewer time delays.

Globalizing Workspace/ Easy Accessibility: Globalizing your workspace or system may add additional agility and effectiveness to your system. For example, you have the ability to access data from home, on holiday, or via the commute to and from work (providing you have an Internet connection). If you need access to your data while you are off-site, you can connect to your virtual office, quickly and easily.

Improve Flexibility and Scalability: Your business can scale up or scale down your operation and storage needs quickly to suit your situation, allowing flexibility as your needs change. Rather than purchasing and installing expensive upgrades yourself, your cloud computer service provider can handle this for you. Using the cloud frees up your time so you can get on with running your business.

Better Resource Utilization: Using technologies such as virtualization and distributed computing, computing resources can be used fully up to their potentials. In cloud model, you can pay whatever you use for your operational purpose.

Backup and Disaster Recovery: Since all your data is stored in the cloud, backing it up and restoring the same is relatively much easier than storing the same on a physical device. Furthermore, most cloud service providers are usually competent enough to handle recovery of information. Hence, this makes the entire process of backup and recovery much simpler than other traditional methods of data storage.

Also adding to backup management, cloud infrastructure can be used as a very strong disaster recovery site as they do have enough infrastructure and technology to be a potent DR Site.

Guaranteed Uptime and Strong Service Level Agreements (SLA): Cloud infrastructure by nature is built for robustness and high availability. Uptime is a major attribute for rapid popularity of cloud computing as all the services provided by cloud vendors should be guaranteed to be working all the time. Hence, the service level agreements between the cloud provider and customer are supposed to be very strong in case of availability and security. By achieving strong SLA’s, customer can operate very effectively with zero downtime.