From cost savings to business agility in cloud computing
The rationale for cloud computing adoption has often been cited as the reduction in overall operational costs, but as a business model by itself it is incomplete as cost savings is just one aspect of the advances being made in developing IT infrastructures.
A more compelling argument is business agility, which can be loosely defined as the dramatic shortening of provisioning over that of a traditional environment. In a recent, independent research survey, it was found that the need to better connect employees via unified communications was three times more valuable to enterprises than mere cost cutting. But business agility has long been considered one of the most salient arguments for companies adopting the cloud.
From the initial stages of cloud computing, when capital and operational cost reductions were exclusively all-important, today's perspective is more about how cloud computing enables greater competitive advantages. In a recent white paper on the subject, it was thought that "corporate decision makers linked cloud computing directly to business agility" for "reframing assessments of IT's value to the enterprise."
The report went on to highlight the maturation of cloud computing and the benefits business agility can deliver to businesses beyond the simplistic approach of cost calculation. And as businesses are now dependent on mobile phones to deliver a range of integrated real-time business communications, cloud technology is the key because of its computing capabilities across multiple devices that can be scaled on demand.
This resource elasticity eliminates over-provisioning so that demand is scaled up when more resources are required and scaled down when they are not. In this context, agility is the speed of implementation that the cloud offers in this space.
And it is this agility that companies are looking at to plan cloud strategies for the future, so as to enable the drive towards enhanced productivity and revenue growth. Towards these goals, reorganising IT business functionality for the cloud to support the needs of customers and to propel companies' IT infrastructure and business processes forward are strong adoption criteria.
But to achieve optimum agility there needs to be a reduction in complexity: by streamlining business processes and implementing of dynamic connections. These are ideas that shore up efforts being made by companies toward creating agile IT.
As cloud computing continues to gain popularity, many companies are beginning to realise the huge potential cloud computing offers, although some are still reticent about migration due to what they imagine is the sacrifice of security.
But vendors are developing cloud solutions that are designed to minimise risk so that decision making becomes increasingly simplified. This allows companies to leverage the cloud to protect in-house IT assets and optimise their company's existing infrastructures and, above all, create value to enable innovation.
