Just as the internet changed the world, cloud computing will too. Cloud computing is a paradigm shift for the way Information Technology is delivered to businesses that allows businesses to decrease their IT costs while they improve productivity and efficiency.
Cloud computing will positively change the way you think about IT and run your business. You will move to cloud computing, its just a question of when. For small and midsized businesses now is the time to begin to adopt cloud computing so that your business can realize the benefits before your competitors.
The reasons for moving to cloud computing systems are compelling:
Faster time to market
- Accessing services over the internet can provide an almost immediate access to hardware and software resources
Lower upfront IT costs
- Pay-per use billing dramatically reduces upfront costs
- No hardware and software to buy and setup
Lower ongoing IT costs
- You do not have to pay engineers to maintain the IT service.
- You do not have to maintain or upgrade any hardware or software.
Easier to scale up or down
- Businesses can seamlessly scale their services and service capacity in correlation with user demand.
- You only pay for what you use, not what you may use next year. Have 20 users now. Pay for 20 users. Later when your business grows you can add more users.
Reduced IT risk
- You do not own, maintain, or administer the hardware and software, the cloud provider does.
- Cloud providers run a highly reliable multi-tenant architecture which is more reliable than what a small or mid-size business can afford to setup and maintain.
Work from anywhere
- Anyone who has authorization can access the service from any location that has an internet connection.
While the reasons for making the move to internet-based systems are compelling, making the shift requires careful planning so that the change does not result in unanticipated problems and disruption to your business operations.
The best practice is to develop an overall strategy based on solid business reasons for moving to the cloud. That will be the subject of a future post.