Where Businesses Need to Focus Their Efforts to Maximize Returns From Cloud Computing
November 20, 2012
Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Samantha Robinson.
Businesses stand to make huge efficiency gains through the use of cloud computing. But many businesses are rightfully concerned that they’re not extracting every last drop of potential from what is possibly a very significant restructuring investment. In this article, we’ll draw from cloud computing theory to suggest areas those concerned businesses can check off to guarantee they’re getting the most out of the cloud.
Cloud computing is becoming ubiquitous and synonymous with remote service provision. As far back as the 1950s, scientists – including Herb Grosch – were predicting the current state of play, with clients accessing centralized mainframes. In fact, Grosch’s predictions – that the entire global community would access data stored in 15 data centers – form a great deal of the foundation behind IBM’s Smarter Planet vision…
There are lessons from the past that we can and should use to approach our cloud provision and strategy in the present. In this article, we’ll examine how the four characteristics of cloud computing laid out in Douglas Parkhill’s 1966 book The Challenge of the Computer Utility can inform our approach to refining the services we offer today. The book won the McKinsey Foundation award for distinguished contributions to management literature, and forms a canonical component of any cloud administrator or network designer’s literature.
Elastic provision. Elastic provision mostly refers to how limited resources – such as computational capacity, storage capacity and network infrastructure capacity – are managed in response to user demand. It’s a key component of any cloud hosting setup as it dictates what kinds of resources each user can access at any given time…
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