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For growing businesses that need agility and reliability to compete, the cloud represents both a unique opportunity and a paradigm shift in the value of IT as a competitive differentiator. Savvy executives are finding that a standardized, global infrastructure has deep bottom-line potential. Because the cloud encompasses these characteristics, businesses can use it to:
- Save costs directly.
- React more quickly and efficiently to new business requirements.
- Increase reliability in several important ways.
- Potentially add revenue by making themselves more competitive.
Being able to directly align IT resources with new business requirements has been hugely difficult in the past, largely due to long and expensive purchasing and deployment cycles. The cloud represents a paradigm shift in IT computing because it can dramatically decrease deployment cycles and make purchasing considerations – at least in terms of planning and reaction – almost a non-consideration.
Over the next two weeks we will showcase a couple of examples of agile cloud infrastructure.
With an agile cloud infrastructure, you can:
Exploit global business opportunities more quickly. Bringing a new electronic product to market in a foreign country, for example, used to mean at best a new outsourcing contract to a data center in that country, requiring separate contract negotiations, IT process alignment, hardware and software deployment and testing, and possibly even new staff hires. By contrast a public cloud will:
- Already have a global presence that allows you to simply request servers deployed in a specific geographic locale.
- Negate the need for hardware purchasing and deployment because resources are virtualized.
- Significantly decrease software deployment and testing since the new servers can be based off images of your current – already functioning – production servers.
- Integrate with your existing on-premises technology, making maintenance simpler.
- Protect your existing software investment by providing full compatibility between on- and off-premises resources.
Cut deployment time by huge percentages. This agility was realized by small firm, which cut its time for deploying a new software-plus-service solution from two months to two hours If your company has extended its private cloud into the geographic region in question, private clouds can offer the same benefits. If not, it’s a perfect example of when to consider combining private and public models.
Next week we will have some more examples of agile cloud computing.