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    5 New Use Cases for the Public Cloud

    Public cloud adoption has grown significantly over the past few years, with spending on public cloud services expected to exceed $127 billion in 2018, up from $56.6 billion in 2014, according to industry analyst group IDC. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is still the most popular public cloud in the world, pulling in more than 35 percent of total public cloud market share in Q3 2015. Smart organizations are finding new ways to leverage the low-cost “extended data center” capabilities provided by the public cloud.

    In this slideshow, Ravello Systems has identified the five most popular new use cases for public clouds (listed in no particular order). Traditionally, it’s been either difficult or nearly impossible to run these workloads in the cloud due to various limitations such as lack of access to Layer 2 networking or restrictions on penetration testing.

    5 New Use Cases for the Public Cloud - slide 1

    New Uses for the Public Cloud

    Click through for five popular new use cases for public clouds, as identified by Ravello Systems.

    5 New Use Cases for the Public Cloud - slide 2

    Virtual Networking Labs

    Businesses today have the ability to run data-center-like networking in the public cloud, including existing virtual appliances from leading vendors such as F5, Arista Networks and Cisco. This is achieved using software-defined networking (SDN) in the cloud. What’s more, the virtual network is completely user defined and can include multiple subnets, routers, and supplemental services such as DHCP, DNS servers and firewalls.

    5 New Use Cases for the Public Cloud - slide 3

    Security Sandboxing/Security Cyber Ranges

    Enterprises can create copies of their data centers on AWS, and also run complex security tests in the public cloud. Built-in encapsulation and isolation enables scalable and safe malware testing, distributed denial of services (DDOS) testing, threat simulation and other penetration tests on demand. Using the public cloud, cyber-range testing can span in size from just several hosts to several hundred. It utilizes capacity from AWS to provide full-featured, pre-configured and tailorable cyber ranges that are deployed on demand in fully isolated environments.

    5 New Use Cases for the Public Cloud - slide 4

    Hypervisor Labs

    Hypervisors, such as VMware ESXi and KVM, can now be run on AWS, creating a cost-effective way to spin up full environment clones for development, QA or staging.

    5 New Use Cases for the Public Cloud - slide 5

    Mobile Test Automation

    Using real and virtual-device clouds, mobile tests — both emulated and simulated — can now be run on AWS. Via the public cloud, tests can be staged within a single dedicated VM. For example, to ensure faster testing, massive test farms with tens to hundreds of Android virtual devices with various resolution and screen sizes can be run on demand on AWS.

    5 New Use Cases for the Public Cloud - slide 6

    Internet of Things

    Successful Internet-of-Things (IoT) management requires the processing and routing of billions of devices and trillions of messages. Public clouds, such as AWS, ease the complexity gathering and benefitting from this deluge of data stemming from IoT systems. Using the public cloud, business applications can keep track of and communicate with all IoT devices, all the time, even when they aren’t connected.

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