How Can Cloud Computing Help Businesses?: A Short Introduction
By: Ekalavya Chaudhuri
Tags: Business Development, Business Intelligence, Business, Cloud Computing, Business Strategy

With businesses having online aspects to them that are getting increasingly more complicated by the day, cloud computing is one of the main technologies of the future. It can help organizations by saving money, saving space, and saving time.

Cloud computing is here to stay, so you’d better wise up.

Before cloud computing arrived on the scene, corporations, companies and conglomerates would have no recourse but to run their various software programs and applications on one central computer system or server, or bank of systems, within the actual physical space of their own site. This was a situation that led to a number of problems.

In the first place, the volume of data that needed to be stored was increasing beyond any previously known frame of reference as we entered the age of ‘big data’. So, lots of space was needed for repositories. Subsequently, the costs required for being able to store such huge volumes of data were also shooting through roofs. Moreover, you would need, and were needing, a perfect battalion of internet technology professionals to attend to the technical maintenance of all of this. And you had to pay their bills too.

Thus, as the complications piled on, when you needed to maintain the productivity of your business, but you also needed to do it within a certain fixed cost, you were no longer being able to do it within that said fixed cost. Here is where cloud computing came in.

The question here is: What is it exactly that cloud computing can provide that would aid the modern-day business?

Flexibility of Access

Well first, cloud computing provides the unique selling proposition of an enormous flexibility of access. You can access the data stored on a cloud system from simply anywhere provided you are in possession of a device with a stable internet connection. You could do it whether you’re at work at a fixed site, travelling, at home in a bathtub, exploring the Ajanta-Ellora caves of India…Heck, you could probably do it flying above the Bermuda Triangle too, although perhaps that one would be a fifty-fifty proposition.

Saving Money

Secondly, what’s more important to a business organization than to save costs? And cloud computing helps companies to do just that in a key way: incur minimal costs related to both acquiring and maintaining IT space. When you have a lot of data transfers, as most modern-day business organizations probably undoubtedly will, you can often have surprise collateral expenses and therefore variable costs springing up all over the place linked to the huge volumes of data required to be stored, if you are preferring to use conventional repositories. With cloud computing you can cut down on all of that.

Recovering Data

Third, we come to the factor of emergency recovery of data. Cloud computing, as its name would probably suggest to you, has the information stored all out there in a kind of ‘cloud’, and that gives you a cloud-based backup. What happens with this? What does it do? Any recovery that you want to implement happens a lot faster if there’s some kind of disaster at your office space, for one. And since time is money, that translates to costs getting saved to, following from the previous. Also, no sneaky third-party agent is going to be getting within your server space, making this a seriously secure alternative you might like to consider.

Ease of Collaborating

Fourth up, we have ease of collaboration. Cloud computing allows multiple businesses to communicate, share data and information with each other, and collaborate, far more easily than more traditional methods. It permits of more efficient cross-over work between employees and executives, allows both to link to customers. Again, it also allows any multiple users at a point in time to share and work on data at the same instant. Furthermore, it also makes it easy for the users to keep track of any changes being made out there in real-time.

Scalability

Fifth, and extremely importantly, you have the scalability that cloud computing possesses as an inherent feature of it. Because of this scalability, cloud computing is particularly relevant, dare I say, ideal, for any business that has a gradually increasing bandwidth demand…which makes it be especially suitable for startups. Should the needs increase, as the needs increase, it is extremely easy to upsize the capacity of a Cloud-based service, drawing on its remote servers.

Cloud computing can help all sorts of businesses.

Is cloud computing just for large businesses or else startups?

It is absolutely not the case that cloud computing is beneficial just for large business organizations or else startups. Small businesses can heavily benefit from it too.

The reduction of operation costs that it provides is obviously something that inherently and intrinsically exists. As said earlier, cloud computing really brings down the expenses of acquiring IT-based infrastructure as well as maintaining it. That is something that would be helpful to any business at all.

Moreover, small businesses probably need to put most effort with both speed and accuracy of their business procedures and handling of information; they cannot afford a slip-up that a larger conglomerate might. Cloud computing can help.

Cloud computing also de facto creates an essentially fully interconnected platform. Such a platform can enable small businesses to gradually compete with other similar businesses on a global level as they further their stages of growth.

Sample Case Study: What Netflix did

As an illustrative instance of all that has been discussed, we can look at the example of Netflix. Netflix is an organization that obviously required ginormous amounts of IT infrastructure: computers, servers, networks, data centers, points of transmission, bandwidth, you name it, they needed it. Moreover, fundamentally, for Netflix the amount of this IT infrastructure that they required at any particular given point in time was directly proportional to the number of subscribers using its streaming services at that particular given instant.

Should Netflix have opted to use a traditional model of business, buying amounts of physical IT infrastructure and resources, it is a question whether it would have made profits. Such is because it would have been a seriously difficult task to accurately predict the demands for their service in the near or the distant future with the kind of pinpoint precision that would be required, and one slip up would have cost them.

As a result of this consideration, Netflix opted to pay Amazon Web Services which already had a huge cloud based IT infrastructure and resources, for using their IT infrastructure and resources as per Netflix’s demand. This in fact is a microcosmic example of what most businesses that use cloud computing do.

This kind of procedure prevents excessive capital expenditure which might be potentially wasteful. Furthermore, it brings down maintenance costs and moreover just in general reduces overhead expenses. In addition, it also permits any business to adjust to variable costs based upon the demand for their particular product or service at some point, and the corresponding volume of data infrastructure that would then be required.

Therefore, it is plainly a fact that cloud computing can help all kinds of organizations. You could use it as the cornerstone of a master plan to both decrease operational costs as well as to take your business operations to a global level gradually. Undoubtedly, it is the single most innovative practice in business management as of this day, and should be given serious consideration as an element of business strategy heading into the future.