“You can quote them; disagree with them; glorify or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them” (thanks, Apple, for that eccentric commercial). Cloud computing isn’t as new as it seems and is popular among businesses of all types and sizes. Legacy or conventional desktop computing has been trending for longer than it should have been. Thankfully, it is fast changing. Changing to cloud computing. Cloud computing refers to software services and platforms offered through the Internet and is available to organizations on the basis of subscription. The cloud has been around for quite a while now, and is becoming the preferred choice for many businesses. Why are these organizations, that were doing fine with installed software, now turning to the cloud? What in cloud computing has won them over?
Many businesses have lost the traditional office model already. Cloud comes as a boon to relatively smaller organizations; emerging ones, whose employees work from home and collaborate online. Any device that has Internet connectivity is all it takes to have access to the organization’s data. More importantly, there are no futile copies of the same data. There is one central location where all the data resides, and every user is served that, from wherever he has access. There are precautionary backups though, but the host handles it all.
Second to costly infrastructure, constant software updates and maintenance are nightmares that haunt businesses. The sad plight of traditional desktop software is that integration and maintenance costs you way more than the actual software itself. On the contrary, cloud computing platforms are updated automatically by the provider, and this ensures that every employee is on the latest platform, without having to spend a fortune on updates alone.
Interestingly, this study on giving back more than what we take, reveals,
Large companies that use cloud computing can achieve annual energy savings of $12.3 billion and annual carbon reductions equivalent to 200 million barrels of oil – enough to power 5.7 million cars for one year.
So, for whatever reason you go to the cloud, be it environmental activism, online-collaboration capability, or freedom from infrastructure, maintenance and software updates, there is this one factor that desktop counterparts can never match. And that is ROI (Return on Investment) or the cost factor. Because, in business, emerging ones in particular, money does matter. And money saved is money earned. The showstopper is that the cloud provides all this, and yet, there is no compromise on productivity. And that is why cloud computing platforms are rapidly gaining the appreciation they rightfully deserve.
With the next generation of cloud power services. Now we can have the power to enable people to work from virtually anywhere, anytime, and on any device with simple, familiar collaboration and communication solutions – but all ought to be backed by the proven security