Cloud Computing Ushering in New Business Ability
The technological era has advanced from the time when enterprises used single to few desktops to perform the organizational functions. Today the corporate environment is made up large number of computer systems, desktops, laptops, printers and storage devices all networked within an organizational setup and even with branches and offices worldwide.
With the aggressive competition prevalent in the business circles and the need for globalization, organizations tend to spend in a vast portion of their exchequer for infrastructure upgrading. They however, need to find methods to streamline the business process and reduce the operational overheads while ensuring productivity levels. The techno savvy business world today, is abuzz with “cloud” and the benefits of cloud computing services. Though this technology has been around for some time now, it has gained momentum and has also evolved because of the efficient and cost effective methods of handling of IT related issues in the organization.
Wikipedia defines the term Cloud computing as -”the delivery of computing and storage capacity as a service to a heterogeneous community of end-recipients”. The data center providers who take in the maximum IT work load for the technologically sound business world, uses this technology to help the IT departments of corporate sectors to relocate to a separate network on the cloud. The cloud computing providers then ensures the maintenance of databases and access to applications.
Data Centers offer cloud computing services to the clients either as Infrastructure(IaaS), a public cloud platform or software(SaaS). The Cloud based services through a public cloud platform are offered as a pay-per-use model facilitating computing within cloud. This paves way for online provisioning and management via the web irrespective of the time and place. The highly multi-tenant environment available on the cloud provides organizations with scalable servers and storage in real-time facilitating elasticity of service.
The on-demand model cloud computing service for network access provides organizations with significant reduction in costs, increased storage and high automation which helps to keep applications up to date with extensive flexibility and control of data. Further, the high reliability, up time and increased mobility allows organizations to access information from anywhere irrespective of the location and device.
Based on shared hosting services the data centre uses the infrastructure either as shared hosted or co-hosted one. This helps organizations to reduce the investments required in additional infrastructure. Other benefits of cloud computing services include secure remote access, ability to expand accessibility, application programming interface and agility.