Cloud services in practice: five scenarios in which the cloud works for your company

WebDisk Blog · category: Cloud · reading time: ~7 minutes

In short:- Instead of generalities about the "key to modernity" – five concrete uses of the cloud in a company: application hosting, backups, data storage, test environments and seasonal peaks.- The common denominator of all five: you spin up resources when you need them and pay for what you use – instead of investing up front in hardware bought "just in case".- To be fair: the cloud is not automatically cheaper, nor is it secure "by itself" – we also cover the cases where it does not stack up.

A server that has been carrying the company's systems for five years is just going out of warranty. You can buy the next one – and again freeze a sizeable amount of capital in a machine that for most of the day will be running at somewhere in the low tens of percent, because hardware is bought for the peak, not for the average. You can also first calculate how much of what that server does can be moved to the cloud – and pay for resources when they are actually working.

This article is a tour of use cases, not a glossary of terms. If you want to get the terms IaaS, PaaS and SaaS straight first, read "Cloud as a Service" – here we take the definitions as read and answer the practical question: what do companies really use cloud services for? We look at five scenarios that companies most often start with when they first move to the cloud.

One sentence of definition, for the record: cloud services are IT resources – computing power, space for data, ready-made applications – delivered over the internet from the provider's infrastructure, provisioned and released on demand, without buying your own hardware.

Scenario 1. Application hosting: a server that grows with your traffic

The most obvious use case: a company website, an online store, a B2B system, an application used by customers. Instead of a physical server – a virtual machine in the public cloud, and alongside it the pieces you would otherwise have to buy and maintain separately in your own server room: private networks (VPC), a firewall, a load balancer distributing traffic across several instances.

The practical difference shows up over the application's life cycle. You start with a small configuration, because the new system has ten users. Six months later it has five hundred – resizing the machine or adding a second one is a change in the control panel, not a hardware order with a lead time of several weeks. Development teams go a step further and set up container clusters on the same resources (Docker, Kubernetes), wiring them into their own CI/CD pipelines.

At WebDisk this scenario is handled by the WebDisk Cloud public cloud – virtual machines billed for the resources actually used.

Scenario 2. Backup: a copy outside the company without building a second server room

The classic backup rule 3-2-1 says: three copies of the data, on two different media, one of them outside the company's location. That last requirement was historically the most expensive – it meant a second server room, tapes taken off site or disks in a safe. The cloud closes out that rule without any of them: the "off-site" copy is storage at a provider, in a physically different place from your systems.

The natural target for the copy is object storage compatible with S3 – popular backup tools can write to it directly, without intermediaries. The resilience of such a copy against ransomware is growing in importance: attackers routinely try to delete backups before they encrypt production, which is why copies that cannot be removed before a set time has elapsed are increasingly required (we cover such immutable copies in a separate article).

One caveat: backup in the cloud does not "happen by itself". The schedule, the scope and – above all – test restores remain your job. We write more about setting this process up in the article "Cloud backup – the foundation of modern IT security".

Scenario 3. Data storage: Object Storage instead of yet another NAS

Company data grows faster than anything else: documents, scans, multimedia, logs, application artefacts. A local NAS answers this with more disks, array rebuilds and the question "what next, when the enclosure fills up". Object Storage scales without any of that machinery: you add data, you do not manage volumes, and you pay for the space actually occupied.

The key feature is the standard S3 interface, spoken by a huge ecosystem of tools – from AWS CLI and s3cmd to programming libraries. An application that can write to S3 will as a rule work with any compatible storage – the differences between implementations concern details, not the core of the API; this is a practical insurance policy in case you ever change providers. In Object Storage from WebDisk, built on the open Ceph platform, you can enable encryption at the bucket level (a bucket is the container in which S3 storage keeps objects, that is, files – a separate, named space for data). At the same time, the distributed architecture stores data redundantly, so that the failure of a single disk or server does not mean losing it.

And if, instead of raw S3, the team needs a convenient interface for everyday work on files, that role is played by front-ends such as Nextcloud – an open platform for file sharing and collaboration, available at WebDisk as the managed service WebDisk Next; object storage then becomes the layer underneath. You will find a broader description of object storage use cases in the post "Object Storage in WebDisk".

Scenario 4. Test environments: infrastructure for hours, not for years

In your own server room the test environment is usually the oldest server in the rack – because "it would be a waste to use a new one". In the cloud it is sometimes the other way round: the test environment can be an exact copy of production, existing only for the duration of the tests. You clone a machine from a template or a snapshot, carry out a trial migration, an update or performance tests – and delete the whole thing, paying for hours, not for years.

The same mechanism drives everyday development work: a separate environment per project or code branch, build machines in CI/CD pipelines spun up just for the duration of the build. The classic conflict of "tests eating production resources" also disappears – the environments are isolated from each other at the network and resource level.

This is the scenario in which billing for usage makes the biggest difference compared with your own hardware: infrastructure that does not exist most of the time does not cost anything most of the time.

Scenario 5. Seasonality: a peak without hardware bought for the whole year

An online store before the fourth quarter, an accounting office at the year-end close, a recruitment portal in the intake season, a campaign backed by a TV ad – many businesses have peaks in which traffic grows several times over for weeks, sometimes for days. Your own hardware has to be bought for that peak; for the rest of the year it stands idle and ages.

In the cloud you add resources before the peak and wind them down after it: bigger machines, additional instances behind a load balancer, more space for data. A fair caveat: simply "buying extra instances" is not enough – the application has to be able to run on many machines in parallel, and that has to be designed in (statelessness, a shared session or data store). Scaling is a property of your architecture – the cloud makes it possible; it is not a feature you switch on with a button.

When does the cloud not pay off? An honest reckoning

• Constant, high load 24/7. If the machines are to work at full steam without a break for years, your own hardware can work out cheaper on the total bill. The cloud's advantage grows with the variability of the load – which is why scenarios 4 and 5 make the strongest case, and a constant, predictable base has to be calculated, not assumed.
• Responsibility does not disappear – it changes scope. The provider is responsible for the hardware, the power supply and the virtualisation layer; configuring the systems, permissions, updates and backups on your machines stays on your side. A badly configured machine in the cloud is just as vulnerable as a badly configured one in your own server room.
• Data transfer. Moving large volumes – especially outbound – can be a significant cost item at cloud providers. Check the terms of your plan before you design an architecture that constantly pushes large amounts of data between locations.
• Dependence on the provider. The more provider-specific services of a particular cloud you build into your application, the more expensive the move will be. Standard interfaces (such as S3) and open software reduce this risk – it is worth asking about them when choosing a provider.

Frequently asked questions

What do companies really use cloud services for? Most often for five things: hosting applications and websites, backup copies kept outside the company, data storage (object storage), test environments spun up for the duration of the work, and handling seasonal traffic peaks. The common denominator: you spin up resources when they are needed and pay for actual use, instead of investing up front in hardware.

Is the cloud cheaper than your own server? Sometimes – but not by definition. The cloud exchanges a large capital expense for an operating cost and eliminates paying for idle hardware; with a constant, full load that advantage melts away. A fair comparison also counts, on the on-premises side, electricity, cooling, servicing, space and people's time – not just the price of the server.

Which scenario should you start with? If the company has no backup copy outside its own premises – with backup. It requires no changes to systems that are already running, gives immediate value and lets you get to know the provider at low risk. The second natural candidate is test environments: a mistake costs little, and the saving is visible straight away.

Do you have to move everything at once? No – and usually it is not worth it. The typical path is a hybrid model: some systems stay local, some (backup, data storage, temporary environments) run in the cloud. The migration of production applications is planned separately, once you have the first experience behind you.

Where is my data physically? At the provider – which is why the location of data centres is a question worth asking before signing a contract, especially with regard to GDPR and industry requirements. WebDisk is a Polish cloud: we store data in Poland, which makes compliance with GDPR and industry requirements easier.

Summary

Cloud services are best assessed not through slogans, but through scenarios: hosting that scales with traffic; backup that closes the 3-2-1 rule; data storage that grows without replacing hardware; test environments for hours; a reserve of capacity for a seasonal peak. Each of them can be implemented separately – and each one can be costed separately. Do you want to check which one makes sense in your company? Write to us – we will help you choose a starting point.