Cloud computing could easily save your start-up money
February 25, 2013
Grazed from CityAM. Author: Tom Welsh.
According to technology consultancy IDC and IT firm EMC, the global digital universe will expand tenfold between 2012 and 2020, reaching a difficult to comprehend 40 zettabytes. To put this into perspective, in 2009 the internet was estimated to contain just half a zettabyte. Even then, if that quantity of data were printed and bound into books, it would form a stack stretching between the Earth and Pluto ten times.
Some businesses are managing to leverage this trend for the own purposes. Famously, Amazon not only tracks what its customers buy, but what they look at, how they navigate its site, and how much they are influenced by promotions, reviews and page layouts. It has developed algorithms that predict products customers would like to buy. And these algorithms get better and better the more often they are used. Amazon’s trick has been to personalise the mounds of faceless data that gets thrown its way…
Amazon isn’t alone, and data manipulation is increasingly becoming part and parcel of doing business. Any firm with any kind of online presence now has to be smarter. Consequently, IT spending could weigh more heavily on the fixed costs of starting a firm. This is where increasingly sophisticated cloud computing comes in – effectively the delivery of IT infrastructure via the internet. Even the most unlikely start-up could benefit from this development…
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