Despite the fact that Cloud has started to become one of the necessary trends for industry transformation, one should not misunderstand it that every business IT is required to switch over to the Cloud.
Today, the IT services have grown enough mature and can easily be delivered as an utility similar to the electric power supply. One can relate Cloud with Electricity of the past, where almost every manufacturing unit had its own power generation unit.
But later with further improvements and advancements, it was possible to get connected to an electric grid. Despite these advancements, number of companies even today have their own power generators in addition to the supply received from the grid.
Advantages of IT as an Utility
- Affordable web hosting models: Cloud hosting allows you to pay only for those resources that your website has actually used, hence enabling providers to implement a pay-per-usage model.
- Reduction in the overhead costs : Since the introduction of Cloud Hosting, it has become possible for organisations to cut-down the overhead costs of IT, by outsourcing it to third party companies. This has enabled them to utilize their financial resources for core business development activities.
- Zero upfront investment: Users are no longer required to bear an upfront capital investment on costly servers, bandwidth etc. Rather that is now been taken care by the vendors who inturn bear these costs.
Cloud service offerings have undergone number of advancements, and the result of which are the offerings such as Public Cloud, Private Cloud and Shared Cloud that have been able to be offered to customers according to their budget and requirements.
Furthermore, Cloud holds the capability to deliver greater value to businesses like offering an easy access to larger resources which was hardly possible for small and medium sized businesses with traditional offerings.
Most of the SME’s have a limited budget hence fail to invest in hiring experts and other costly IT resources. But, with the introduction of Cloud, even the SME’s have gotten greater opportunities to utilize high standard resources and take their businesses to greater levels of operations.
The cloud has offered businesses to experience enterprise grade software and infrastructure at much easier and cost effective way. Hence allowing them to use better performing IT resources, scalability, availability and uptime which was only possible for large corporate businesses in the past.
This was all about the opportunities available with Cloud, there also exists challenges included with switching over to Cloud. As always, Data security is still one of the highest priorities for IT departments. All cloud hosting providers might not be in a position to maintain equal standards of data security. One need to be smart enough to choose between reliable the vendors of cloud.
Cloud has brought a significant shift in terms of technology as well as operations. Inspite of all the challenges, Cloud has managed to attain a level where even the small or medium sized business can now utilize the flexibility of Cloud services, yet achieving maximum returns from the current investments and resources.
