Monday 15 August 2011

When The Cloud Becomes The Silver-Lining…


Cutting cost is no more an option. It is a must-do that is high on the priority of every organization that wants to survive this slowdown. And no stone is left unturned to find ways to achieve that.
Interestingly, this anxiety to cut costs will result in a business that IDC expects will grow to $42 billion by 2012. Or so it seems.

Yes, we are talking about cloud computing.

If you are wondering how this business of IT keeps throwing out new jargon and concepts in the air in frequent intervals, let me say that you may already be using cloud computing to some extent.
John McCarthy had predicted way back in the early 60s that Computation will someday become a public utility and it looks like his prophecy is coming true now.

If you use Google docs, you are a participant in cloud computing. Some common Cloud computing applications are Salesforce.com, Google apps, etc. Cloud computing is nothing but software or technology made available over the internet as a service.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service(SaaS), Platform as a Service(PaaS), Web 2.0 etc. are all components of Cloud Computing. When you use applications such as those offered by Google Docs (Word, PowerPoint and Excel) you are using Software as a Service. Conventionally, while you paid and had Microsoft Office with MSWord, MSPowerpoint and MSExcel installed on your PC, with Google Docs, you don’t buy the licenses or install any software, but can still access the applications on a need basis – over the Internet. For now, Google docs is free, but imagine being charged for access (by time, by kind of features you use, by frequency etc).

The big difference is that now you don’t need to pay the full license price of Microsoft Office regardless of how extensively you use that investment, but pay only to the extent you use. That is potential saving for sure. When core packaged apps like Enterprise Resource Planning, CRM, etc are made available on demand, there is a huge potential for savings – you don’t pay heavily for license, you hire fewer resources, you don’t invest heavily in CapEx – meaning you don’t need to buy servers and other hardware, and you don’t run huge fixed costs for managing them.

Thank you for reading and please feel free to leave a comment!



All information presented here is © copyright Carkean Solutions Ltd., 2010 - Not to be used without our permission - The views expressed here are the views of an individual not the corporation

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