The Cloud Makes It Rain Money: The Business in Cloud Computing - Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure - page 371

Workshifting in the Cloud
Workshifting is a strategy to get work done in the right place by the right people at the
right time. Cloud computing decouples all the constraints that prevent this flexibility from
being achieved. The cloud offers architectures, models, and tools that enable an easy flow
to resources for the users. Operations, applications, and data can be moved from location
to location and at will. The concerns of operability, manageability, security, and location
are removed, which enables the users to focus on the job at hand. The following are a few
reasons for adopting workshifting.
Drive Business Growth A virtual computing infrastructure allows organizations to bring
new locations online in a short amount of time and provision applications and services in
a matter of hours. This enables capturing a large market base without capital expenditures
and related worries.
Enable Virtual Borderless Collaboration Teams spread over multiple geographical regions
play vital roles in many organizations. Timely and real-time collaboration between geographi-
cally distributed teams is necessary for business productivity, affectivity, and growth. Apart
from saving travel costs and enabling virtual availability, cloud resources offer a common plat-
form for sharing documents and information. Moreover, this enables a consistent set of up-to-
date data and helps in engaging in coherent communication and making informed decisions.
Move Processes to Optimal Locations Business processes can be moved to the most
suitable locations. Virtual systems can be designed that fulfill the need for tools and ser-
vices required for a particular job or project. Those systems can then be replicated and
deployed to any number of users and locations.
Improve Customer Service Quality and Speed Workshifting empowers enterprises to
deploy resources according to customer requirements rather than requiring customers
to adapt to their constraints. Task-aware and relevant experienced consultants can be
placed on site with important customers for providing solutions to customer problems.
Moreover, replication and redundancy of resources (compute, storage, and network) can
help minimize service downtime, which grows customer business and improves customer
satisfaction.
Bring Your Own Device
Bring your own device (BYOD) is the policy of permitting employees to bring personally
owned mobile devices such laptops, tablets, and smartphones to their workplace and use
them to access privileged company information and applications.
BYOD is significantly changing how people work. In high-growth and emerging mar-
kets, 75 percent of employees use their own device at work compared to 44 percent in
developed markets.
http://cxounplugged.com/2012/11/ovum_byod_research-findings-released/