Empowering greater business collaboration with cloud computing

Introduction

Cloud computing is emerging as one of the most important transformational trends in business and computing. It is a method of providing a set of shared computing resources that include applications, computing, networking, development and deployment platforms. It enables greater resource allocation and efficiency by supporting a self service model so resources can be acquired or provisioned based on business needs.

Listed below are some fundamental technical and business benefits of cloud computing:

Technical benefits

1. Elasticity

In a traditional server environment, you get a physical system that is designed with a certain amount of storage space and computing power. With cloud computing, you can purchase everything from computing resources to storage and bandwidth based on what you need which is called elasticity. This will allow businesses to better plan your infrastructure resources based on your current and projected future needs.

2. Economies of scale

One of the important technical advantages of cloud computing is its ability to allow many companies to share in advanced technical and best practices expertise. By leveraging a commercial security cloud service, many mid size businesses can share the benefit of this expertise without spending a fortune. Overall, the risk of data breach or leakage will be further reduced and better managed.

3. Collaboration services

One of the most important benefits of cloud computing is that it provides an ideal platform to enable collaboration between employees, partners, customers and suppliers. A wide range of important collaboration services exist, including services that allow a team to work jointly on a document to conducting an interactive web based training session.

Collaboration services also support the exchange of ideas via a social business community. Social business collaboration environments are evolving into a cost effective and dynamic way to market and communicate with important constituents. Collaboration services enable you to identify the right experts at the right time to dynamically support and align your business goals with your business partners.

Business Benefits

1. Greater cost efficiency

The cloud provides a new economic model of computing, instead of purchasing, managing and maintaining a server environment, a business is able to purchase computing on a situational basis, avoiding capital expenditures.

Cloud computing allows small businesses to stay nimble and stay competitive by allowing the company to add more services when needed and to discontinue if a new program doesn’t work out. This will enable greater resource planning and utilisation leading to better financial management and cost efficiency.

2. Enhanced partnership opportunities

Cloud computing allows for greater partnerships in which the business could partner with other businesses in the community. Using a set of cloud based collaboration and business process services, the company can experiment with various partnerships to see which ones will work without purchasing additional servers, software and networking services. By sharing and collaborating in the same ecosystem, it allows faster response times and also improve overall customer satisfaction.

3. Improved operational efficiency

By adding virtualisation, it allows the organisation to consolidate the IT environment and also to make existing environment to be more efficient. By standardising the existing server and software environment and automating existing routine processes, the CIO can take out costs and invest in new services that don’t involve capital expenditures.

Innovate with cloud computing

Small and medium-sized businesses and startups can leverage the flexibility of cloud computing to effectively compete against much larger competitors. By being able to leverage and empower sophisticated business services without huge capital investments, I foresee that mid to small sized companies can innovate and experiment with new business models, establish new partnerships and devise innovative ways of building customer interaction and loyalty.

This is only enabled by the flexible, elastic, and self service computing resources to support rapid business change and drive digital transformation to compete effectively and capitalise on new and emerging market opportunities.

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