Role of Cloud in Business Growth
By Ghassan El Khazen Engagement Partner, Edarat Group
Role of Cloud in Business Growth
Cloud computing can benefit a business in various ways. But before we discuss this in details, it’s better to have an elementary idea about cloud and its functionality. Cloud computing outlines a scenario in which hosted services are delivered over the internet. Cloud is essential for businesses because computation and storage have long been two vital requirements for enterprises. Through cloud computing, these requirements can be met easily and instantly without hardware usage.
and software as a service (SaaS) indicate that the client needs literally nothing but a computer with internet connection. Everything else could be provided by the vendor. This model is highly scalable for businesses with data centers, because data centers often have extra storage areas and sometimes extra equipments than actually required. Subscribing to cloud technology can enable those businesses to lower cost on data center maintenance and yet manage their IT infrastructure better than before.
However, these are just surface level advantages and there are more to expect from cloud. Two salient features of cloud computing are its being restricted within B2B framework and its providers are very large scale businesses. The growth of a B2C business depends on whether it can attract end-consumers and get them purchasing its products/services. The growth of the business depends upon this. In case of service-driven business-to-business interaction however, the buyer and the provider are both business and business growth is bidirectional here.
There’s an ongoing debate as to whether colocation is better than cloud. Some argue that hardware issues within the cloud environment can’t be addressed. With colocation however, the enterprise can be rest assured that whatever hardware issue the data center undergoes, it can be settled. An even stronger argument is; using cloud may save spending on hardware, but charges to rent software, infrastructure and applications on cloud isn’t cost effective.
Cloud computing represents such a setting. Wellhandled IT infrastructure indicates better management of those businesses. Cloud is a great solution for efficiently managed IT infrastructure. Scalability, elasticity and instant access are some of the advantages come along with cloud. By using cloud, a business can lower cost significantly. Buying software, running it on the system can all be skipped just by connecting the machine to a cloud, provided by a vendor. In this way, the business can reduce spending on hardware equipments as well as software usage. The three distinct models of cloud service; platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
Some truth is involved in these arguments. Since cloud is essentially B2B, vendors may charge quite an amount of money and henceforth, it could be difficult at the day’s end to estimate which of colocation and cloud technology will be better in terms of saving. But selecting cloud or colocation is difficult only in the background of data center management. Otherwise, colocation has hardly any role to play when the client is opting for platform as a service and the device is a Tablet or a Smartphone. But then again, that’s not B2B. In the B2B framework, cloud appears to have more layers than colocation.
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