With Cloud Computing, Flexibility Isn’t Always a Good Thing
July 12, 2014
Grazed from PC Magazine. Author: Michael Miller.
In my last post, I talked about how cloud computing, and in particular Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), is and is not particularly flexible. Flexibility comes from a model that doesn’t require any data center hardware and from a series of extensive APIs that are an integral part of the best SaaS offerings. But at the same time, SaaS applications are inflexible in that they don’t allow much customization to the core software itself and that typically every customer has to be running on the same, most current version with no options.
As I look at it, I’m beginning to think that the areas in which cloud applications are most inflexible may actually turn out to be one of their strongest features. I can argue that traditional client-server applications have offered too much flexibility, and large organizations in particular have spent too much time, effort, and expense in customizing them. We all know examples of organizations that have spent millions (or sometimes, tens of millions) of dollars on customizing their ERP solutions, perhaps with limited upside…
The beauty—although potentially also one of the traps—of SaaS is that these programs assume everyone will adjust their organization to match the software. Sometimes this is in little ways, sometimes in larger ways. But a company can’t really change the way the software works. As a result, companies that pick these packages don’t spend a lot of money customizing and changing them—and many are finding that they get along just fine without the changes they would have otherwise made. In other words, sometimes "good enough is damn good enough."…
Read more from the source @ http://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/none/325436-with-cloud-computing-flexibility-isn-t-always-a-good-thing