Transformative Benefits Driving Companies to Cloud Computing

By Rahul Bakshi (Profile)
and Satish Hemachandran (Profile)

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Monday, February 28th 2011

While in the last year cloud computingexperienced a great wave of awareness and adoption, the next phase of the cloud evolution will bring greater maturation and convergence. For many organizations, the previous year proved that cloud computing can meet the demand for improved IT efficiency.

The cloud has demonstrated it can deliver a virtualized, secure infrastructure solution that is scalable, reliable and provides organizations higher availability at lower costs when compared to a dedicated IT environment. This important for often resource constrained IT departments in companies and government organizations that are immersed in workday responsibilities needed to support the business.

Cloud computing can help take pressure off IT staff while also helping deliver measurable business benefits. For instance, with cloud computing, organizations can leverage the benefits of a shared IT infrastructure without having to implement and administer it directly.

While it took virtualization many years to be widely accepted by businesses, cloud computing is experiencing a much shorter ramp-up period for acceptance. With cloud computing, the battle has already been won, in part, since organizations rely heavily on virtualization.

The business benefits are also much clearer than they were initially with virtualization. At the end of the day, cloud computing can help businesses save money on day-to-day operations, making it an easy adoption decision for most organizations.

Companies Looking to Shed IT Infrastructure

Cloud computing has been able to ride the clear market trend that many organizations are looking to get out of the business of owning and maintaining their own IT infrastructure. These companies want to tap into the investment service providers have made in IT tools, automation and elastic technology.

The results from an August 2010 survey by Yankee Group confirm this trend, with 24 percent of large enterprises with cloud experience saying they are already using Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS), and an additional 37 percent expect to adopt IaaS during the next 24 months.

Over the next year, we can expect to see continuation of the maturity of cloud offerings with additional security enhancements, service improvements and convergence of various cloud solution technologies and standards to better address customer needs. These drivers will help accelerate the market adoption of IaaS.

Another key to growing market interest in cloud is the ROI an organization can realize through cloud adoption. However, when determining ROI, IT organizations need to look beyond just reducing capital expenditures – even though major gains can be made there.

The ROI analysis should be based on a comprehensive view, considering all aspects required to deliver the solution – assessing factors such as, are they able to deliver services more effectively and efficiently? And, can they take better advantage of capacity on demand – like seasonal spikes – and achieve faster times to market?