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18

APR

When is the Cloud Right for You?

18 APR 2012 | Posted in business strategy, business value, cloud computing | Author Alex McLachlan | 1 Comment

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The Cloud is a huge opportunity for organisations to improve speed to market, provide operational resilience and increase value for money. However, there are complexities that need to be considered and you need to be careful to select a solution that is appropriate for your business.

Many organisations are using the cloud for email and office applications, particularly from Google. Others are utilising cloud services from the likes of Amazon to provide rapid, flexible testing platforms to bring new ideas to market and to scale for peaks in demand - "cloud-based services are allowing SMEs to have industrial-strength IT very quickly" as Gartner analyst Dave Aron said recently. A good example of an organisation taking advantage of the cloud is Big Society Capital, who are in the process of rolling out their new services rapidly using cloud services, something that would have been very difficult to achieve if they had to purchase and then set up their own infrastructure.

Amazon provides extremely flexible services that can be rapidly set up, deployed and then taken back down, all paid for by units of processing utilised. The take-up of Amazon's Cloud services has been huge - it is estimated [March 2012] that Amazon has of the order of 450,000 servers.

There are though some limitations to Amazon's cloud services. This sort of limitation has led Acquia, the leading Drupal hosting company to diversify to provide a range of Cloud hosting services for different needs, from fully shared to completely private.

Another area where organisations need to be aware when making decisions about the Cloud is the financial implications. One of the attractions of the Cloud is the different payments models, using OpEx rather than CapEx. This though can still be problematic as discussed in a recent HBR blog post "The Truth About Cloud Economics".

Another example is that whilst Salesforce is a very attractive Cloud-based CRM platform that can give considerable savings for a compact set of users, if a wider community requires occasional access (consultants who have part-time sales activities for example) then the costs can be prohibitive.

So, the Cloud has a considerable potential benefits, but the options need to be considered carefully to deliver the best business value.