Traditionally, businesses bought servers and software that were installed in their offices. Both servers and software cost money up front. Additionally, staff had to be trained not only in using the system but also in maintaining the equipment and software.
And once operations started, various other issues appeared. Data and applications had to be backed up to recover from inevitable data loss situations of many kinds. Equipment and system crashes had to be monitored and attended to in a timely manner. You needed a whole department of expensive IT people to attend to everything.
Cloud computing saves you all this trouble. You work out an arrangement with a service provider for what you want, and the servers and systems you want will be available in minutes. You can upload your applications to the new servers and start operations.
You can go further by looking for a vendor who offers software as well as servers on the cloud. The combo will save you the time spent on uploading, installing and configuring the software. Instead, you just start using the software in minutes. And you will automatically get to use the latest version of the software without even being aware of it.
Compare this to the earlier scenario where you had to wait for your IT department to get and install the servers, configure them and arrange staff to make everything operational while you waited (and probably soon lost your enthusiasm for the whole project). Few managers will be willing to take on the hassle and go for new ideas in such an environment.
Done right, organizations care release the creativity and potential of their employees by going in for cloud computing. Capacities and capabilities will take on an entire new dimension under cloud computing. And doing it right means getting to know cloud computing and what it can do, and then starting to use these to meet your particular needs.
Just who in your organization will attend to this task? Or will you ignore the dramatic new potential of cloud computing?
