Over the past decade, cloud services have rapidly become one of the most defining technologies in IT. The hype surrounding cloud services may make it seem like all of an organization’s resources should be migrated to the cloud immediately. There is no denying that, in certain cases, cloud services can be tremendously beneficial. In others, however, a cloud migration probably doesn’t make sense.
Services providers are developing business models to build their own cloud and attract customers to purchase their cloud services including hardware and software infrastructure, middleware platforms, system components, software services, and applications. On the other hand, businesses are building their own private clouds to achieve cost saving and taking the advantage to eliminate time required for requisition and provision of IT resources, improve resources utilization, and increase services responsiveness.
The power of Cloud Computing
Prior to adopting cloud computing the biggest challenge for IT management was procuring and configuring comparable IT resources and significantly supervising, monitoring and upgrading systems. Adopting cloud technologies across the entire business can produce remarkable benefits in efficiency, agility, and innovation. The outcomes of the use of cloud computing will include increased IT service delivery efficiency, increased missions’ effectiveness, and reduced costs:
Efficiency:
According to Gartner, cloud computing will help enterprises to reduce their data center infrastructure expenditure by approximately 30%. Similar efficiency improvements will be seen in end-user support up to 15% to 40% by using other cloud computing services such as desktop cloud and in software applications by using SaaS. Hence, businesses can shift focus from technology to core business competencies and missions.
Some efficiency gains that businesses get include resources utilization by implementing virtualization technologies and lowering labor costs. Depending on the cloud computing deployment model, the nature of some costs will change from being capital investment in hardware and infrastructure capital expenditure (CAPEX) to Pay as you go operations expenditure (OPEX) model with the cloud resulting efficiency improvements that can have direct impacts on the bottom line costs.
Agility:
Cloud computing will allow businesses to improve their services, respond to changing requirements faster and rapidly scale up to meet unpredictable demands.
Business agility is fundamentally connected to IT agility, which means that companies with IT agility will be more flexible and responsive to their business demands. Cloud computing provides IT agility in the hands of users by supporting rapid automated provisioning of computing resources.
65% of IT CIOs and business leaders believe that cloud computing plays a key role in increasing IT agility.
So cloud computing will make the IT investments less sensitive to the uncertainty in demand projects’ forecasts, which frequently emerge rapidly in response to project needs which cannot be known in the early stages of budgeting.
Innovation:
Cloud computing has allowed businesses to use their IT investments in an innovative was to easily adopt innovations, helping IT services take advantage of leading edge technologies to devices such as tablets and smart phones.
Cloud providers are inventing new customer value propositions by providing cloud services:
- Enhance: customers use the cloud services to improve their services and products.
- Extend: Cloud makes it easy to create new products, services or utilize new channels.
- Invent: using the cloud help businesses to create new needs and new markets.
For more on how you can explore cloud computing for your business, reach us at info@sysfore.com