Cloud Computing – Why is it so good for business?
- From a financial perspective, Cloud Computing pushes risks onto the people that own the assets. The business in effect rent a particular set of assets, based on their usage. For the business this transforms IT capex into opex.
- From a development perspective, Cloud Computing enables you to potentially roll out your solution in minutes or hours, instead of weeks or months. An scale according to demand
- From a work activity perspective, Cloud Computing enables the enterprise to involve people regardless of organization boundaries and empower them with the necessary knowledge to perform their tasks.
There are three types of Cloud Computing paradigms that build on each other.
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) - Amazon Web Services (AWS). At the core, Amazon provides 3 basics services: Storage (S3), Computing (EC2) and Queues (SQS)
- Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) – provide different combination’s of services to support the application development lifecycle
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) – Saleforce.com , an application is hosted as a service provided to customers across the Internet. By eliminating the need to install and run the application on the customer’s own computer
And these can be used in the business environment to:
- Reduce the risks associated with capital expenditure , by moving to a pay-as-you-go model
- Scaling based on actual demand rather than best guess
- Use Amazon or another company to managing Service Level Agreements
- Allow the cloud provider to Manage problems and incident
- seamlessly upgrade to new versions of a software as the provider upgrades
- Securing data, processes and infrastructures, the use of the cloud for disaster recovery is very economical and gets away from supporting redundant data center for disaster recovery purposes
- reduce the need for staff with specific skill sets
