Consumer and business applications have always been too expensive especially in times like these. Behind each consumer or business application, there is a world of complexity. They need a datacenter, office space, power, cooling, bandwidth, networks, servers and storage, a complicated software stand and a team of experts to start, configure and run them. You need development, testing, staging, production and failover environments.
When there is a problem, good luck on that. You call your technical support and they don’t know anything so they blame someone else. When new versions are out, you might upgrade but that might bring the whole system down.
Now this was for one business application, when you multiply these headaches for dozens of hundreds of business applications, it is easy to figure out why the biggest companies hire the best information technology departments for their needs but small business don’t have a chance.
Cloud computing is a better way to run your business. Instead of running your consumer or business applications yourself, they are run on a shared datacenter. Just plug in like a utility, this makes it fast to get started and costs less. Cloud computing is like Gmail compared to Microsoft Exchange.
- With Gmail, do you need servers and storage? No.
- Do you need a Technical team to keep it up and running? No.
- Do you have to do upgrades? No.
When you use any business application in cloud, you just need to login, customize it and you start using it. That’s the power of cloud computing.
Cloud computing is not just used for consumer applications; It is also being used for business applications. It is also called Enterprise cloud computing. Businesses are running all kind of business applications in cloud computing these days. E.g. HR, Accounting, CRM and custom build applications. Cloud computing costs less because you don’t need to pay for all the people, products and facilities to run you applications. In addition to that, cloud computing is more scalable, more secure, more reliable and there are vast majority of applications out there. They are based on an architecture called multi-Tenancy. With multi-tenancy application, they don’t need to have a new copy of application for every user. Its just one application every one shares but its flexible enough for every one to customize for their specific needs. It is like a giant office building where every one shares the infrastructure and services and each business can customize their own office base. Cloud computing applications can be scaled to accommodate thousands of users or to down the few ones. Upgrades are taken care of for you so you get security and performance upgrades and new features automatically. They way you keep cloud applications is also different. Forget about buying servers and software. If you are with cloud, you don’t buy anything at all. You only need to pay predictable monthly subscriptions. You only pay for what you use. Cloud applications don’t need your valuable IT resources so your CFO will love it. You can focus on projects that really impact the business like deploying more applications. Cloud computing is a simple idea but can have a huge impact on your bottom line.
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Comment from Mark Eisenberg
Time June 4, 2010 at 10:55 am
I’d like to clarify a few points. Full disclosure: I’m on the Windows Azure sales team.
For obvious reasons we are not keen on the absolute comparison between GMail and Exchange since Exchange is also available as a cloud offering via our Exchange Online Services.
More generally, the postion taken above is very SaaS (Software as a Service) centric. To be sure, the SaaS model will be a great fit for many businesses. But not every business. And some companies will still need to ‘make’ their applications vs. ‘buy’ them and will be better served by the PaaS (Platform as a Service) offerings from companies like Microsoft (Windows Azure) and Google (GAE).
Some other applications may require the fine tuning only available through the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) offerings from companies like Amazon (AWS) and RackSpace.
All three models have benefits and tradeoffs and in all liklihood every business will be able to find some benefit from one or more of these approaches. But please keep in mind that not every problem is solved by cloud computing. It is just a new, very exciting option for deploying applications.