Cloud Computing Special report
<< big advantage. Also, if you talk to a CFO
of any reasonably large enterprise they will tell
you that IT is a big item on their books. Not
only does it account for a lot of the company’s
spend, but it can also be very difficult to place
a true business value on IT assets. So Cloud
is an opportunity to get those difficult-to-value
and expensive items off the books.
James Norwood, Epicor
Two of the biggest benefits of Cloud
Computing to customers are cost savings and
flexibility in scalability. Users can to scale up
and scale down their use as needed without
that affecting their costs. In the case of an
on-premise installation, a company might put
in place an expensive IT system with a lot of
capacity to support the business, but then
find that later on that capacity isn’t needed.
However by then they are already saddled
with the software and hardware. So probably
the best benefit of the Cloud is it is there when
you need it and you can scale back quickly
when you don’t with no penalties.
Steve Strutt, IBM
The Cloud
concept is
very much
an opportunity
to experiment
with new
business
models, new
ways of maintenance costs. So rather than invest a lot infrastructure provisioned for peak demand,
actually doing of money in maintaining much of their existing which means that when their demand is not
things without premise-based infrastructure, the money peak the utilisation is very low. However, with
significant could be used to invest more in business the Cloud you don’t have to over provision for
up-front investment. There will of course be capabilities, and even additional IT. peak loads; you can ramp up and ramp down
some workloads that will need to remain your use of an application at will depending
stored on the company’s on premise system Raghavan Subramanian, Infosys on your current business demand.
for various reasons. Nevertheless, I think a There are a number of both business and
migration of much of a company’s data technology benefits to be had with Cloud Steve Farr, Microsoft Dynamics
towards the Cloud could actually lower their computing. From a business perspective one The deployment model is not just the
costs in ways other than simply savings in benefit is that you can ‘try before you buy’. technology choice. Cloud computing really
up-front capital expenditure. For example, And from a technological perspective, says OK you might have a group of highly
using Cloud-based services can save on IT businesses often want their on-premise skilled IT people but what is their value if >>
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MANUFACTURING
&LOGISTICSIT March 2010
www.logisticsit.com
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