What is the difference between cloud computing and cloud storage?

You may be thinking about moving some of your business systems to the cloud or maybe you have already started. Eurostat reported that 41% of EU enterprises have already embraced the cloud in 2021, primarily for email and file storage, which, in comparison with 2020, had only 36%, indicates that cloud adoption is on the rise.  These businesses are moving to the cloud to digitally transform their operations and are harnessing its power to become more effective, efficient, and competitive.

However, for many businesses cloud technology is still quite a new phenomenon, and with so many things covered under the umbrella term of “cloud” it can be quite confusing. In this blog we will be focusing on cloud storage and cloud computing, what they are and how they are different from each other.

If you’ve already used services like OneDrive, Dropbox, or iCloud, you may already be familiar with cloud storage. In essence, cloud storage is a place you can store your files, folders, videos, and images that is “offsite”, rather than relying on only being able access your data through local networks, servers, and hard drives. Cloud Storage gives you the flexibility to access your data through an internet connection or a dedicated private network from anywhere.

The key benefit of cloud storage is the ability to keep a copy of your data offsite, which helps protect your business data in the event of an unexpected disaster. Some other key benefits are:

• Improved access: Work from anywhere and access your data at any time, all you need is an internet connection.
• Collaborating and sharing made easy: Share your files directly from your cloud storage with a unique URL to anyone you wish to have access, this makes collaborating remotely a lot easier.
• Scalability: Pay only for the storage size you need and expand it as your business grows or downsize your storage if you need less.
• Security: Professional cloud storage companies such as Veeam have extremely high security and put additional layers in place to ensure your data is protected.

Cloud computing is essentially anything in the cloud which isn’t storage. In its simplest terms, cloud computing is the delivery of computing services over the internet. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining these technologies you can access them with pay-as-you consume pricing. There are three main types of cloud computing including Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service. Each type gives your business different levels of flexibility, control and management depending on your requirements.

Examples of SaaS: MailChimp, Google Workspace, DocuSign, Microsoft Business Central, and Microsoft Teams.

Examples of IaaS: Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, and Google Compute Engine.

Examples of PaaS: Windows Azure and Google App Engine.

• Business Agility: Cloud computing can give your business the resources it needs to scale up and grow as and when you need to. The deployment of cloud computing resources is quick, and seamless to adapt to your business.
• Cost savings: Cloud computing allows for more flexibility when it comes to the expense of these resources. You now can adapt a pay-as-you consume model on a month-by-month basis, as opposed to buying physical servers yourself which would be a lot more costly.
• Automatic updates and integration: Always have your business on the most up to date version with the latest patches. Cloud computing services can easily be deployed across the cloud environment, meaning that users get the latest patches and new features immediately rather than needing to purchase an upgrade.

• Ensuring team collaboration: Cloud computing, especially SaaS products can provide your teams with excellent tools to improve teamwork and collaboration. Especially with tools such as Microsoft 365 Office Suite that allows instant and seamless document collaboration, Microsoft Teams which through video calls, teams channels and chats ensures your team stays in contact regardless of location.

• Flexible working: Cloud computing allows for teams to be mobile whether they work in the office, on customer sites or from home, resources within the cloud can easily be retrieved, recovered, or processed with just a few clicks.

Hopefully, you are now beginning to see the differences between cloud storage and computing and how they can bring a variety of benefits to your business. In the simplest terms cloud storage helps to store data, and cloud computing helps to process data. It’s easy to see why cloud computing adoption is on the rise, it’s never been more popular.