The major vendors of cloud computing services spend a lot of time jostling for position trying to pitch their own unique view of how the Cloud will benefit your organisation.
No matter what their particular selling message may be, it is clear that there are several common reasons why you might find Cloud services helpful in your own IT provision. Here are 5 major reasons to think hard about this approach.
- Reliability
- Scalability
- Agility
- Device Independence
- Support cost savings.
Let’s look at each of these in turn.
Reliability
Reliability is a key component of any modern business requirements. The average customer has gradually changed their expectations of online interactions with companies to the point where even a small delay on a website can make the difference to whether or not they even stay to do business with you.
Not only that, but the “constant on” nature of the internet means that your business is effectively visible to the entire planet for 24 hours of every single day. Even if your customers are only the internal users of your business systems, major failures in the running of your computer infrastructure can impact business heavily.
Reliability, in the context of Cloud Computing, extends the idea of a failover service or equipment. Where a business might have had a standby system in place, that business may now use cloud services that are geographically distributed but which are available transparently through the kind of location independence that the cloud provides. In a worst-case scenario, these same services may even be provided by alternative suppliers, although this is less likely.
Scalability
Scalability is the bane of many CIO’s life. How do you go about making sure that you have all the power you need for spikes in demand, without having systems lying around unused for the rest of the year?
The beauty of a cloud service offering is that the cost of usage is usually directly related to the number or amount of those services used.
If you have a peak need for more CPU power (say for Christmas e-commerce needs, or end-of-year tax returns), then just kick off a few more virtual machines in the cloud and then release them when the crisis is past.
Agility
Agility is a difficult concept to measure but is cited by many successful organisations as the reason they have been able to pull ahead of their competitors.
Where Cloud Computing is concerned, this is all about being able to tap into the “latest, greatest” solution for your needs without having to commit to all the training and support costs of bringing that capability in-house.
Geoffrey Moore in the “Gorilla Game” talks a lot about moving non-core business systems outside the company, so you can focus on what you are good at (and what brings value to your customer). The cloud allows business to do just that with IT services.
Device Independence
At first glance, device independence may not seem to be such a key advantage. However, with mobile devices now overtaking fixed PC’s as a means of using the internet, device independence is going to become more and more important for maintaining a competitive offering in the market.
For the in-house IT team, this independence allows more flexible equipment deployment for staff and also makes things like remote-working so much simpler, as the internet protocols involved are also location independent for the user.
For an end-customer, device independence means the ability to choose how they interact with your business. The rise of the smartphone and the tablet makes these devices an important gateway into your offing.
Support Cost Savings
Although we have touched on this already, there are enormous savings to be made in terms of keeping in-house expertise available for every IT system you use.
A traditional “large” IT system will include many different technologies, both hardware and software, and will usually need a business to keep staff on hand for most, if not all, of these technologies.
The savings in hardware costs alone should not be underestimated, but these pale into insignificance when compared with the training and employment costs of the IT staff needed over the lifetime of a business system.
While these are by no means the only benefits of a cloud computing solution, they should serve as a big enough wake-up call for any IT management team looking to gain better control of their IT business solution.