Cloud computing, reach new heights with it

BANGALORE, INDIA: The industry is undergoing a fundamental shift with the advent of cloud computing. 

The shift is disrupting the traditional way of doing business and the old way of thinking. As the cloud continues to level the playing field for businesses, both large and small, we are seeing fast adoption that have helped to unleash great  ideas and innovations by start-ups right through to the CIOs of global corporations to government organisations.

Also Read: Five reasons why enterprises do not like cloud

There are a few key trends that propel the imperatives of the cloud that are driving change and solving real world problems in an unprecedented way:

Safe haven

Over the past year, a number of natural disasters hit the Asia Pacific region - Cyclone Yasi in Australia, the Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand, severe flooding in Australia and Bangkok, the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

They were stark reminders about our vulnerability and the swiftness with which catastrophe can strike anytime. For CIOs and business leaders, events like these act as a spur to give urgent consideration to disaster recovery and business continuity planning.

The cloud provides an ideal environment for mitigating the risks on businesses of these very real scenarios. In a traditional physical environment, a typical approach would involve signing multiple years of contracts that are locked in with traditional IT vendors or managed service providers, co-location facilities, or even building new data centres for disaster recovery measures.

It’s hard to swallow the outlay of time and huge capital required for set-up and maintenance when, under normal circumstances, this infrastructure is under-utilised and hugely over-provisioned. Importantly, it is hard to predict if these long term commitments will work accordingly when disaster strikes and meanwhile, you have been paying for the upfront commitment of disaster recovery infrastructure year-after-year under uncertainty.

Disaster recovery implementation in the cloud is much cost effective and simpler than traditional disaster recovery solutions. You can completely automate the process and bring up an entire cloud environment within minutes. The beauty of having a business continuity strategy implemented in the cloud is that it automatically gives you higher availability across different geographic regions without any major modifications in deployment and data replication strategies.

You also have the flexibility of implementing disaster recovery measures with fine grain control that meet your users and line-of-business requirement. For example, you can select which sets of data or apps, for which business divisions, at which locations and determine its uptime depending on its criticality.

You can fine tune them anytime you want it according to the changing business conditions. You can also test and create mock scenarios of disasters in the cloud very easily. Also, the scalability of the cloud with transparent pricing options enables you to select the most cost effective model that meet your internal company stakeholders. In all cases for the cloud, it is pay-as-you-go with no upfront fee and no long term commitment. 

Businesses save time and capital needed from the heavy lifting of undifferentiated infrastructure, enabling greater business agility to cope with the dynamic changes in the world.

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Great leveller

Another growing trend is the vast amounts of data that exist in organizations which continues to grow in leaps and bounds. In today’s competitive environment, effectively leveraging large scale data can be critical to business success. Data can drive deep insights about customer behaviour, help improve quality and cost of operations, drive innovative product features, and ultimately increase the bottom line. 

With the cloud, businesses can roll out hundreds or thousands of servers, even those with high performance computing power, in a matter of minutes and pay for they actually use. This helps businesses drive costs down significantly while enabling them to analyse enormous amount of data quickly at a very low cost, giving  businesses, researchers, analysts and developers the competitive advantage .

Through the cloud, data analytics is no longer the purview of large enterprises. Every young business launching today knows they must integrate data collection and analytics from the start. In order to compete in today’s market, these companies must have a deep understanding of their customers’ behaviour, allowing them to continuously improve how they serve them.

Launching a business with a minimally viable product and then rapidly iterating in the direction that customers lead them is becoming a standard approach to success. However, this cannot be done without efficient, scalable data analytics. The cloud has levelled the playing field to allow organisations of all sizes to compete in a big data arena.

Incubating innovation

We are also seeing tremendous rise in entrepreneurial activities across the world. Many start-ups are driving hard to innovate and get their product in the hands of customers at neck breaking speeds.

For example, with millions of smart phone users worldwide, and the hundreds of thousands  of applications growing by the day, mobile developers and the businesses they serve need scalable infrastructure to develop and host the backend services. With the cloud, mobile developers are no longer worried about managing infrastructure resources, which is often either not their core competence or they simply do not want to spend time on it.

They are now able to focus on building sophisticated, scalable and accelerating their products to the market. Moreover, mobile developers are able to leverage the prowess of the cloud for fast, complex processing of their application services before delivering the presentation layer across form factors and multiple devices to ensure great user experience.

Realistically, not all products or applications will be an immediate runaway success and some innovations will take time to reach their full potential. The cloud provides a low cost way for engineers, product developers and even marketing folks to experiment new ideas, know what works or do not work within a short timeframe so that they can move forward with successful ideas very quickly.

Cloud has revolutionised and sped up an organisation’s application development cycle, encouraging innovation and creativity. 

British science fiction author, inventor and futurist Arthur C. Clarke once observed of the space programme that ‘a whole generation is growing up which has been attracted to the hard disciplines of science and engineering by the romance of space’. The fact that the cloud is powering this new surge of innovation at very low cost means that a wealth of new applications and new ways of doing things, that did not even exist five years ago, are now viable.

Today, there is whole new generation growing up which has been inspired to further the reach of technology and development, to stretch the boundaries of possibility, by the prowess of the cloud.