Author, Csilla Zsigri
Dear Cloud Expert,
I’m a potential cloud user. Ongoing technical discussions about what cloud computing is, do not help me much in understanding what clouds are useful for, they rather confuse me. I guess I will never fully understand what you really mean when you use all those expressions like on-ramp or bursting or runbook automation. Also, my feeling is that not every company that bills itself as a cloud player has the experience or domain knowledge to back that claim. What I really want to know is why I should use a cloud, how to get started, how the different models work, which vendors I should be considering, what their competitors are doing, if there are deployment experiences and best practices I can look at, and so on.
I would appreciate if you shed some light on this.
Posted by
The Customer
Dear Customer,
I´m glad you posted your needs and concerns. I´ll try to walk you through some important business drivers which can help you understand the benefits of the cloud.
I see cloud computing as a way to use technology rather than a technology itself. It’s a logical endpoint for some combination of activities including grid and utility computing, virtualization and automation. With clouds, enterprise IT is not organized neither wholly in-house nor entirely outsourced, instead it is located at some optimal point between the two.
Cost reduction is a key driver in the short term. For instance, you can run simulations in a day and then have more time to write a report. This translates into cost savings that would otherwise have been spent on provisioning new hardware. Cloud computing eliminates the need to procure and manage hardware and you pay only for what you consume. You reduce capital spending without negatively impacting operations.
Operational flexibility (scale up/scale down) that clouds offer, the ability to more quickly respond to changing needs and faster time to market are often more important in the long term than lower cost. You can expand on on-demand and pay-per-use, scale fast and if it doesn’t, fail it cheaply.
Business agility, flexibility and execution enable you to effectively start over with new projects and reuse components between projects. This drives better utility and community across your organization or organizations. You can also support your developers by addressing their needs to create their own applications or do simulations as cloud computing allows them to quickly develop and deploy applications and services.
Automation is another key driver for using clouds. Provisioning automation is a force multiplier for overworked systems administrators. The benefits are immediate in terms of both time and money.
Faster time to market is a key enabler of innovation that gives you competitive advantage. It provides you with the ability to more quickly respond to changing needs.
Using the cloud, you can make your revenue grow and shrink your operating costs at the same time. You can quickly deploy and scale your services along with reduced administrative overhead and achieve higher total ROI.
Green issues are climbing the corporate agenda and legislation will reward them in IT as elsewhere. Choosing third-party cloud services means that you are able to reduce your own phys¬ical IT footprints and power consumption and pass along responsibility for the associated carbon use to a third party. By the same token, the use of internal cloud mechanisms enables organizations to better manage underutilized resources.
I hope you find this useful. In order to answer all your questions, let me invite you to our next event, a half-day program, where industry experts, cloud providers, financial professionals and end-user companies will join together to learn, understand, network and develop strategies for today’s cloud marketplace.
Posted by
The Cloud Expert
698 Responses to “The customer’s point of view”
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