Attractions of #cloud
Cost Savings May Be Significant :
With typical IT organizations spending over 30% of their budget on infrastructure (primarily data centers and data networks), shifting some or all of this work to the cloud can save organizations anywhere from 10-20% of their annual IT budget, savings that can either be returned to the firm or reinvested in growth and innovation.This cloud run-rate economic advantage comes from two primary cost drivers: higher utilization rates as a result of a significant drop in “capacity hoarding” and lower unit costs from the increased scale, newer technologies, best practices, and improved operational efficiency of the cloud providers. The cost of ownership gap of 30 to 40% between traditional IT and public cloud services is predicted to continue, if not widen, over the next few years,
Business and IT Benefits Go Beyond Cost:
Cloud technologies are “elastic” and provide the ability to add (and subtract) capacity quickly and easily. This eliminates the need to hoard capacity (with the resulting cost).For the business, the cloud represents an opportunity to break away from being locked into the perceived high-cost, slow-to-respond captive IT organization. specifically, business users expect the cloud will enable them to:• satisfy customer expectations for more and better services through online and mobile channels, faster and more flexible delivery, and greater product selection• Innovate by leveraging mobility, social media, the cloud, big data, and other disruptive technologies• Lower the cost of business operations through operational excellence• Improve financial performance and its basis for competitive advantage• Allow greater focus on core competencies by outsourcing non-core activities and freeing up capital, i.e., shifting CapEx to OpEx.
Developers are increasingly building apps in the cloud. The latest Forrsights surveys show that nearly 50% of business-unit-aligned developers already are building, or will build, apps in the cloud by the end of 2016; 55% of their peers in IT operations consider private cloud a top infrastructure priority; and 31% plan to adopt public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas) in the coming year.
Public cloud is the default backbone for “The Internet of Things”. The Internet of Things (IoT) will generate billions of data and aggregating this data and acting on its findings will best be achieved by capturing, analyzing, and responding from the cloud. If you want to analyze billions of inputs in real time or near real time, you won’t want to pull the data back to your data center. With cloud-based Hadoop6 and saas-based BI solutions proliferating, it’s becoming hard to justify bringing this data down to analyze it.It is no wonder that many organizations, from small start-ups to global enterprises, are interested in capturing the benefits that cloud computing can deliver, but unless you are a startup with a blank canvas a major challenge exists—translating those favorable economic benefits into tangible bottom-line benefits given large sunk investments in existing infrastructure and legacy applications.
To conclude : The cloud business case needs to address a number of key strategic business and technology questions to overcome this hurdle. For example, the cloud is not just about lower costs, what about driving business growth and increasing agility to rapidly respond to the market? At the same time, you can’t ignore potential risks like security or compliance with regulatory, legal, and contractual obligations.