Based on IDC report 2008, Cloud Computing indicates significant growth which it is growing 6X faster than traditional IT spending. Over the next decade, businesses ranging from multinational enterprises to small local organizations will shift an increasing amount of their spending from conventional IT spending to cloud computing services and perhaps you wonder, is it the right time to migrate to cloud computing? Let me show some points that may help you to answer it. I am going to tell you how big cloud computing is along with few factors that driving it and also couple of reasons why organization decide to migrate to cloud.
How big cloud computing?
Projected cloud spending
Worldwide IT Cloud Spending 2012
What is driving cloud computing ?
The cloud computing phenomenon is driven by economics. Let’s look at few of the economic value from both the customer perspective and vendor perspective below.
Cloud computing from customer perspective :
- Easier to consume, scale and manage cloud assets and applications than build and maintain on-premise infrastructure
- The monthly or quarterly recurring payments make it easier to budget for cloud services
- No ongoing operational expenses for running datacenter
- No upfront capital required for servers and storage
- Applications can be accessed from anywhere and anytime.
Cloud computing from vendor perspective :
- Cloud services have capability to service multiple customers with less resource that it will absolutely reduce operational cost.
- Cloud services are relatively easily expandable (or collapsible) in meeting operational needs. Solution providers control costs by only ordering the capacity needed and expanding when necessary.
- Many cloud services and infrastructures are automated, meaning provisioning, updates, patches, upgrades and account management are done through a single control panel. This feature will reduce operating overhead.
- In the cloud world, everything is done over the Internet or private connection. This reduces travel time, increases productivity and often means a cloud provider requires fewer human resources.
- Clouds are easily adaptable to changing customer needs. Solution providers can add new capabilities and resources to their offerings to meet customer needs and expectations, thus increasing the revenue and margin yields more easily than on-premise IT solutions
However, in spite of the trumpeted technical and business cloud computing benefits, a lot of prospective cloud computing customers have yet to migrate the cloud, and also those major organizations which are cloud computing customers are mostly putting only less sensitive data within the cloud. The following are the some barriers of cloud computing.
Cloud computing barriers
Cloud Computing barriers from customer perspective :
- Cloud Computing brings out considerable problems regarding security, privacy, data integrity, audit trails, intellectual property manage¬ment, and lack of control
- Sometimes regulatory requires data has to be locally retained
- Certainly not well suited for real-time applications because The cloud can be many milliseconds away
- Not all applications will work on public clouds therefore not all existing legacy applications can be switched into cloud
Some reasons to migrate to cloud computing
You have to think about several issues before sending your organization into the cloud. There isn’t just one approach. You might choose one or more of these approaches at different times for different reasons.
Consider a few simple examples:
Your company is building a new application that will change the way you sell products online. You want to stress test this new application before releasing it to customers. Although you have a few extra resources inside your firewall, they aren’t extensive enough to demonstrate if the new application will really scale. Using a cloud computing Infrastructure as a Service enables you to test the application effectively.
Your company has run its own email internally for more than 20 years. It takes up a lot of space in the data center and requires a staff of ten people. Money is tight and the CIO must cut staff and capital expenses. The CIO finds a kind cloud computing service – Software as a Service -platform that can run the corporate email for a fraction of the cost of running email internally. Your company makes the move and the savings are dramatic.
Your company is building a new but highly experimental application that might transform its business model. It might not be worth spending a lot of money on software and hardware upfront. In fact, if the project succeeds, the new application may be deployed in the cloud (and not within your company’s own data center). Therefore, the company uses a kind of cloud computing service — Platform as a Service (PaaS) — that includes its own well-designed and fully vetted development environment, new generation tools, and interfaces that allow it to connect to many different environments. It’s not required to pretest each of the components supplied by the PaaS vendor — they’re properly designed and also have been tried. The new application developed on this platform is finished in record time and deployed to a customers test group straight from the cloud computing service.
Your company has started using a third-party SaaS solution for its customer-management application. It has successfully replaced the onpremise customer-relationship management package that you’ve been running in the data center for years. Now your company wonders what else could be moved out of the data center into the cloud. How about the mainframe transaction processing system that handles all orders worth more than $1 million? After some investigation, you realize that because the system is only used by a few individuals in the company and the information needs to be carefully governed, the cloud computing isn’t a good choice.
Your CIO has seen some new software that could solve a serious problem, but you aren’t convinced that the solution is right. Instead of buying a license, your company decides to use it as a service. After six months, it proves valuable. The software company offers you the opportunity to use the Software as a Service or on premise.
As you can see, planning your cloud computing strategy has many different dimensions — maybe more than what you might have thought about in the past. You need a road map to think about how a cloud computing strategy can be used to support your company’s business goals.
