In many economy, markets are evolving faster than ever before, and the trend seems to be accelerating, so company globally need to adapt and change the way it goes to market. From a business perfective, the flexibility and speed with which new solutions can be delivered via cloud supports enable the business units to react better and faster. When transformation become reality, company starts seeing some of the benefits other companies have been enjoying, starting with faster speed to market on new offerings.
So what is Cloud computing? Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources such a servers, storage, networks, applications, and services that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
A sustainable cloud computing business model should have the capability of translating new technologies into a service value proposition. The resulting business logic must clearly demonstrate the interaction between the business model, its position in the value chain and all the associated elements, and the cost model must show how costs are aggregated and distributed across customers. How does backup and recovery options in the cloud become solution as the cure for storing the burgeoning data volumes of nowadays businesses? Security, reliability, scalability and cost effectiveness are the key parameters on which the available cloud storage services are being evaluated. Cloud computing has the potential to be the next major driver of business innovation, as it promises to enable new business models and services across all industries. Cloud delivery models will open access to new customer segments especially emerging markets and small business. Also it might fundamentally change the balance of power in existing markets.
Cloud has the potential on the way of the next major driver of business innovation by enabling many new business models in industries. Strong Value Proposition for business of IT Information technology, including operations, management, applications, infrastructure or maintenance has become a major for large enterprises. So that, the demand for all types of IT is forecasted to grow as the digital and physical words become increasingly interconnected and provide the opportunity for new capabilities and services. Cloud computing’s key benefits is reduction of IT costs. Some research figured out that Cloud makes utilization up to 70% and cut down IT labour costs by 45% or more. Cloud approach provides flexible delivery model. Additionally, it makes the minimum unit of purchase more granular. So, organizations are able to purchase software by the hour, rather than on a per license, or acquire server space by the size and time period, rather than per server.
IT organisations have been key decision maker for provisioning IT resources for projects.
Indeed, all new projects in the company would involve IT, and the IT team was responsible for acquiring, architecting and delivering the solution that would sustain the application or project during its lifecycle, planning for upgrades along the way.
In order to build a Cloud Strategy when considering and building a cloud strategy, organisations should need to consider business objectives or outcomes desired, quantifiable and time-bound goals as well as identify specific initiatives that the enterprise can and should undertake in order to execute the strategy and the achievement the goals required.
Cloud Computing
- Utility computing
- Standardized software stack
- Differentiated by service quality
- Adheres to Open Cloud Principles
- Single-source cloud computing
- Adheres to Open Cloud Principles only in name; locks in
One of the important key is that the legal system within which the organisation operates also has a direct impact on your strategy and needs to be considered when moving applications to a cloud.
How do I decide which cloud service may be right for my business needs? In order to help company to decide which cloud services (IaaS, Paas, SaaS) may be appropriate based on business, below are three examples of scenarios where organisations are able to acheive real business benefits through the adoption of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS
Cloud Architecture
Software as a Service (SaaS). Companies or any type of consumers get access to specialized software suites hosted on a cloud infrastructure. The applications are accessible from various client devices through PC, mobile phones, interface such as a web browser. The users does not control or manage the underlying cloud infrastructure with the possible exception of limited user-specific application configuration settings.
Platform as a Service (PaaS).
The capability provided to the companies or any type of consumers to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure applications created or acquired using programming languages and tools supported by the provider, the platform also guarantees right load balancing and scaling in a transparent manner to the cloud users. The Companies or any type of consumers have control over the deployed applications and possibly application hosting environment configurations.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
The capability provided to the companies or any type of consumers are to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the users is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications. The raw computing resources are exposed to the consumers’ even though the user does not control or manage the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, deployed applications.
Logical Cloud Computing Model
Companies should consider that cloud is firstly and secondly a technology. If The Cloud is business strategy, in order to realize it, will demand a thorough evaluation of existing processes, of the legal and technological framework of the company, coupled with an action plan with well definite, measurable targets and detailing a communication plan, which will be taken in each step for company employee.
IT has to need to evolve becoming a business partner. The Cloud providing the tools by which IT offers significant scalability, flexibility and speed to market that the business units are searching for in market.
There are different cloud deployment models that provide different benefits and value based on an organisations needs and wants. Here is the different cloud deployment models.
Private Cloud The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a single organisation comprising multiple consumers. It may be owned, managed, and operated by the organisation, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on or off premises
Public Cloud The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for open use by the general public. It may be owned, managed, and operated by a business, academic, or government organisation, or some combination of them. It exists on the premises of the cloud provider.
Hybrid Cloud The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures (private or public) that remain unique entities, but are bound together by standardised or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability.
Community Cloud The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a specific community of consumers from organisations that have shared concerns such as mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations. It may be owned, managed, and operated by one or more of the organisations in the community, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on or off premises.
Advantages and Disadvantages
The advantages and the disadvantages of migrating to cloud is mentioned as below
There are several benefits accrued for migrating to the cloud as against staying with the traditional IT management companies ranging from reduction in cost to increased business agility, however the cloud does not solve all a company’s IT problems as a matter of fact it is not suitable for some companies to migrate to the cloud.
Advantages of Cloud computing
Operational benefits: there are a host of operational benefits which a company gains by migrating to the cloud, ‘operational benefits’ as a term means gains which are related to the day to day running of the company. Flexibility and mobility which implies the possibility of accessing cloud services from anywhere and on various platforms, this leads to efficiency in getting things done. Self service provisioning enables a do it yourself approach to IT and this is backed up by simple interfaces which give the power of choice to even the commonest of employee. IT employee should be utilised in better ways without worrying about maintenance issues that are common place with huge in-house IT infrastructures.
Environment friendly: cloud computing is environmentally friendly due to it reduces the energy consumed since its adoption reduces the quantity of hardware components which a company needs to manage so that the hardware component is moved to the cloud provider which often has centralised infrastructures such as data centres.
Scalability: Cloud services are highly elastic with the ability to scale up or downsize in the course of its use. This prevents idleness of resources which sums up to increased efficiency on the part of the companies.
Reduced time to market: Time to market is the duration between when an application is being built and when it finally launches to be used by the intended user. Companies with cloud computing are able to get their IT resources up and running within a short frame of time by scaling all the hierarchy of procurement, maintenance, installation, and updates so on.
Reduced cost: This is arguably the main motivation for moving into the cloud. Cloud computing provides an on-demand service model and a pay per use pricing model whereby a consumer only pays for what is used based on a set service level agreement. The cost effective feature cut across not just the pricing model but other known cost such as cost of IT maintenance, salaries of IT employee, and huge cost of investing in software licensing. Cloud computing simply convert fixed costs to variable cost thus giving the company the choice of varying its computing need with respect to its sales and revenue thereof.
Disadvantages of Cloud computing:
However, Cloud computing might not be always suitable. Many companies are still wary of using the cloud especially when the clients business is a critical one whereby huge investment can be lost due to a downtime.
Security: trust issues with sensitive data and the security issues surrounding having such data in the cloud especially when those data determine the fate of the company.
Compatibility: Integrating cloud services with existing in-house IT could be a bit of problem especially when it involves Legacy systems. Also migrating from one cloud service provider to another could be hectic as there is currently no agreement on the standardization of cloud computing’s external interface. So that, Companies might stucked to a cloud provider.
Data loss: the cloud services are targets for attacks and thus opened to being infested with bugs and viruses. This could lead to data losses which might be very disastrous to the cloud users’ companies and often times such losses cannot be valued in monetary terms.
Licensing: Utilization of software on cloud platforms are also backed by various complex licenses model. It should be clarified in advance between sides.
Data transfer: Cloud services depends on the internet and thus it is traffic the speed of downloading on the user’s side and uploading on the part of the service provider. So that, data transfer bottlenecks might occurs especially when it involves huge data sizes.