Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Scalability
One of the most dramatic beneits for
SMEs and start-ups. If successful,
applications designed to autoscale can
scale endlessly in a cloud environment
to meet the growing demand.
Large enterprises with signiicant hardware, legacy software, and staff resources can
beneit from cloud scalability by identifying CPU-intensive processes such as image
processing, PDF conversion, and video encoding that would beneit from the
massively scalable parallel processing available in clouds. While this may require
modifying legacy applications, the speed beneits and reduced local hardware
requirements may far outweigh the software modiication costs.
Skills and stafing
While the proper design of cloud
applications requires high-level
software development skills, their
maintenance and support is vastly
simpliied in the cloud environment.
Cloud providers handle all
maintenance and support issues for
both hardware and platform software
at costs that are either bundled into the
usage fees or available in various
conigurations as premium services.
This allows signiicant cost savings
through reduced staff overheads.
Because the majority of enterprise IT costs goes to support legacy applications and
hardware, the greatest stafing beneits will be seen in new cloud initiatives that do
not add to the stafing burden. Longer-term, as the enterprise begins to analyze
cloud technology potential for its legacy operations, retraining of existing staff or
bringing in new staff with cloud technology skills will be necessary to take
advantage of the new paradigm. Thus, some investment will have to be made before
large-scale or long-term beneits will be seen. The stafing investment may be
signiicant if the enterprise is attempting to create a private cloud to handle dynamic
resource allocation and scalability across its operating units. In this case, it may face
signiicant staff investment as well as the required hardware, software, and network
investment to implement and maintain their private cloud.
Energy eficiency
Because SMEs can dramatically reduce
or eliminate local servers, cloud
computing provides direct utility cost
savings as well as environmental
beneits.
Even very large enterprise IT data centers cannot achieve the energy eficiencies found
in the massive facilities of public cloud providers even with aggressive high-density
server and virtualization strategies. In periods of economic downturns, green
initiatives typically cannot compete for scarce capital funds. By employing a mixed
strategy that off-loads applications and processing to external clouds when feasible,
IT managers are able to minimize their energy costs and carbon footprint.
System
redundancy and
data backup
This is a large beneit for SMEs, the
majority of which are poorly prepared
for hardware failures and disaster
recovery. Cloud storage can reduce
downside risks at low cost.
Because cloud technologies distribute both data storage and data processing across
potentially large number of servers, the likelihood of data loss due to hardware
failure is much lower than in most large private data centers. The cloud data storage
can provide a cost-effective supplemental backup strategy.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search