Let's look at a few reasons why organizations will keep investing in cloud computing and why learning about it will provide you a competitive edge over others.

Lowers Infrastructure Cost

Instead of buying hardware, you are renting it. This means you only pay for what you use and for the time you use it.

• The cloud provider takes care of maintaining and upgrading the hardware for you. This reduces the need for IT specialists.

• It also reduces the time required to procure hardware, software and licenses.

• Temporarily required instances can be spun up and down for the duration that they are required. This is a great way to save cost of infrastructure required for testing.

Supports Fast-paced Innovation

By abstracting the infrastructure setup, cloud enables you to focus on the application development.

• It provides PaaS and SaaS services which you can build on top of. This further reduces the need to reinvent the wheel for repetitive tasks.

• Cost-effective concepts like Serverless make it easier to experiment with new products without requiring a significant initial investment.

All these factors reduce the time to market and help organizations stay ahead of their competition.

Battle-tested Security

You would rather use a tried and tested security solution than build you own. Moreover, with cloud its mostly a matter of enabling a few configurations.

Cloud providers provide a wide range of security features like:

• Firewalls,
• DDoS protection,
• Fine-grained access control,
• Encryption,
• Compliance with data privacy and security regulations,
• and more.

Geographical Distribution

It makes it easier to geographically distribute data and services.

Database redundancy can be set up to replicate data across the world. Similarly, services can be deployed to several regions.

This can have benefits like:

• Low latency service to people in multiple countries,
• Safeguard against downtimes and data loss due to natural disasters.
• Eliminates single point of failures at a regional level.

Your services can keep running even if a data center burns down.

Elastic Scalability

• You can scale your cloud services to meet spikes in load.
• More importantly, you can scale down to save cost when your users are less active. -This makes it suitable for small to medium-sized businesses where it's important to save money in every way.

High Availability

Most cloud services come with an availability guarantee.This means that if a service fails, it's the provider's responsibility to ensure that the service is available again.

• If it fails to meet the availability SLA, you get compensated for it.

Please note that you don't get compensated for downtimes due to your own fault - e.g. bad code, bad deployment strategy, under-provisioning, etc.

These benefits motivate big organizations to more towards the cloud. These savings in cost, reliability and speed convert to millions of dollars for them.

On the other hand, it enables startups to get started quickly and avoid huge initial investments.

This translates into demand for skilled professionals with knowledge and experience in cloud technologies.

Cloud skills have become a part of most usual software roles like DevOps, Backend development, Data, ML and AI. Additionally, new cloud specific roles have emerged.