A Business Case for Cloud Computing
They new buzz word in the IT world seems to be “Cloud Computing”.Everyone has an opinion on what is cloud computing.
For sure without doubt Cloud computing promises to increase the velocity with which applications are deployed, increase innovation,and lower costs, all while increasing business agility.Given this enormous opportunities, enterprises can leverage an external cloud, build their own cloud internally, become a cloud services provider, or choose a blend of these options to achieve or gain the advantages that enable them be more agile.
Take a look at Amazon, Google, and Yahoo!.This enterprises baffle as to how they are able to produce such phenomenal cost savings over what an individual enterprise can achieve, given the market pricing for basic compute and storage. The fact is that cloud computing costs less — and it allows people to become much more agile in how they’re using IT resources.
The cost savings are a result of increased efficiencies, which have always been a feature of Web-scale computing. By leveraging technologies like virtualization, companies are able to achieve a much more efficient use of computing resources, improving infrastructure utilization rates and streamlining resource management while providing on-demand scalability. When combined with utility pricing, this removes the need to overprovision in anticipation of future demand peaks. And instead of funding very large capital investments, businesses are able to pay only for the computing resources they actually need and consume, which allows them to convert capital expenses to operating expenses.
The business agility are as a result self-provisioning features of cloud computing meaning much faster time to market. There’s no need to negotiate long-term contracts. Built-in services means someone else has already figured out how to build a scalable storage system, so companies don’t have to do that work themselves. Cloud computing also enables greater elasticity; if an application grows to be very large, cloud customers only need to pay for increased resources when they’re being used. This allows for a more flexible business model behind applications being deployed in the cloud today.
Africa is uniquely positioned to maximise the benefits of cloud computing.As Network Providers seek to increase the quality of internet connection to broadband standards cloud providers especially SaaS providers can quickly reap the benefits of cloud computing.
Resources: Sun Microsystems
