Help Companies Save Money
Companies can save a lot of money in their investment into cloud computing technologies that can help organizations take the burden of acquisition of servers, software, and people that are needed to stand up enterprise services, shared technology solutions, and deployment of customized or custom off the shelf solutions that are needed to support mission requirements of the enterprise.These solutions that are normally performed "in-house" within the boundaries of the organization can now be performed by outside vendors that specialize in niche technologies allowing them to provide cheaper solutions to their customers. These vendors have the resources, servers, software, and infrastructure in place that are needed to provide a specialized service to an organization. Companies end up saving more money because they do not have to do all the work that is required to set up the service, they just sign up with the vendor and outsource the service to the third-party that manages the technology that is delivered to their clients.
Help Small Business Become More Efficient
The economy is making it really difficult for small businesses to compete with mid-size and large scale organizations to gain new customers in their industry. These new customers allow companies to gain revenue which leads to organizations investing in their technologies to improve their efficiencies. When you are a small business, the chances are that you are getting a smaller piece of the revenue in your industry. The assumption could be made that small business can not afford the technology that is needed to compete with the large companies to improve their competitiveness. When you are purchase software, you have to purchase the hardware, and resources to support the service. This can add up to a lot of expense for an enterprise service for an organization and can make it impossible for a company to even think about a technology product. Cloud computing is a technology that is changing the game all together in how small businesses are now able to compete with larger companies. Cloud computing allows companies to buy into a service because the infrastructure is hosted by the vendor. The company can pay for more licenses as their business grows but they will be able to get the software that is needed to allow their company to prosper.
Help Save the Environment
Organizations that implement cloud computing technologies can have a significant impact on their ability to reduce their electricity bills dramatically. If you ever seen your company's data center, you could see up to hundreds or more servers depending on size of your company's business. Each of these servers generates heat and if they generate to much heat then the servers stop working. When servers stop working then mission critical applications go down and this leads to a lot of customers complaining to the help desk. Data centers have built in cooling systems to help keep the room cool and at certain humidity. All of this cost the company a lot of money to keep the servers running at optimum performance. Now, if each organization has a data center and each has their own cooling system this is leading to a lot of electricity that is being used to keep all of these data centers running around the world. Cloud computing helps save the environment because it is shared infrastructure resources that a vendor provides to an organization. Cloud computing vendors that specialize in infrastructure service have built up data centers around the country and offer their data data to other companies. Companies do not need to have their own data centers, they can just have their applications hosted with the cloud computing provider to help save energy through sharing resources.
Access to Information Anywhere at Anytime
The Internet and cloud computing technology is a winning combination. These two technologies have allowed vendors to develop a product called "cloud drives"; which is an online storage medium that allow people to save their documents, videos, photos, and music over the Internet. The advantages of a cloud drive is that it provides the ability for people to access their information from any computer around the globe at anytime during the day. This type of simple technology allows people to become more productive by improving their access to information. There are a number of vendors that have entered the cloud computing market to offer cloud drives such as Google, Amazon, and Dropbox to name a few. These cloud drives have built in security, a file directory system that people are familiar with navigating, the ability to upload your files from your computer to your cloud drive, the ability to download your file from your cloud drive to your computer, and share your files with other people that you grant access to your account. The access to information is going to play a key role in the workforce's ability to telecommute remotely for organizations to save on facility costs. This is going to be the next big trend for companies as they try to reduce their expenses by finding alternative ways to cut their expenses to fight lost revenues because of the economy. We just provided an example in how technology can help companies make their work more mobile, productive, and collaborative by using the cloud.
Cloud Computing Solutions Are Easy to Use
The reason why cloud computing is catching on is because of the simplicity that vendors have been integrating solutions to use this technology in the first place. If you ever had the chance to access your email such as Outlook or Gmail then you know how simple it is to access a cloud services. People like simplicity, excellent customer service, and more sophistication in the services that they are receiving from companies. As long as sellers make it simple and enjoyable to access cloud technologies then it will become more integrated with other products. Ease of use means more product adoption which equates to more reasons why cloud computing is important.
Increased Demand for Resources
As the demand for cloud resources continue to grow then there will be the need to develop a work to continue to innovate, cultivate, and maintain the services to meet customer demand. This will have a dramatic effect on the information technology market that is looking for new ways to develop opportunities in a weak economy. The need to grow these resources will have a trickle effect on the institutions and trade schools that will develop curriculums to meet the training requirements that are needed to fill the void for these requirements. Companies will then also develop their own certification standards and develop governance procedures to manage how people get certified in their products. The increased need for a technology increases not only the need for resources but education and dollars that are associated with the services that are delivered. Innovation and ideas are important to our economy and the cloud is proving to be the next big idea.
Integrate Part of a Disaster Recovery Solution
Organizations need to protect their critical data to ensure that they can provide services to their customers and that can continue their daily operations to support their corporate mission. Most companies develop a disaster and recovery plan that discusses the necessary steps that they need to take for any type of events that the company may face. The company prepares for these events by having an alternative computing facility to save mission critical data for the organization at some remote location away from the corporate headquarters. Companies also routinely take full and incremental backups on a daily and weekly basis that is stored on some type of storage storage device. Companies can now integrate cloud computing as a type of storage device that they can integrate with their disaster recovery plan in addition to their other methods that they are using to save their data. Having a cloud storage solution helps provide additional safeguard procedures to help ensure that customer data will be safe and that your organization will continue to operate based on any type of event.
Will Lead to New Product and Platform Innovation
The need for new product ideas and innovation is critical to the success and growth of the global economy. These new product innovations can come from improving on older technologies or collaborating with existing technologies to form new ones. Cloud computing is positioned to be an important ingredient that companies can use to bundle with other services that can provide customers with new experiences. The number of possibilities that companies can combine with cloud computing is infinite and we are excited about the future innovations that may rise from this technology. We are already seeing innovations from companies such as Amazon, Google, Rackspace, IBM, and Microsoft. Cloud computing is new technology that has just begun to assemble the policies, technologies, disciplines and is not at a mature state yet. There is so much potential to grow this domain forward and it will be exciting to see what will happen in the next ten years in the evolution of the cloud. We expect to see more synergies from different technologies and possibly more collaborations from vendors in offering customers better solutions.