Cloud

For the past two years, cloud computing has been one of the most popular terms in the technology and business industries. Consumers like me sure has benefitted tremendously in terms of data accessibility, ease and storage with services like Dropbox and Box.net. Furthermore recently the Skydrive by Microsoft, offering a whopping 25gb and allowing online documents editing just raise the standard bar even higher. But the main question lies within whether that cloud computing can really benefit the businesses. E-mail was one of the most basic forms of cloud computing where the emails exchange and data are all stored online. With storage and servers becoming much cheaper, it’s no accident that data-based cloud technology would slowly taking over the IT industry. SaaS (Software as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service) started to gain more attention more businesses as they allow them to purchase units of service and treat them as variable cost depending on their usage, rather than undertake large capital investments and constant maintenance fees. This is a new form of outsourcing, where companies contract the specialized companies namely SAP or SAS, to handle their customer relationship managements (CRM). With cloud computing, companies can now better access to their data without having the physical access to the their server. With more and more companies looking into outsourcing some of their processes into cloud computing. 

A survey by Accenture shows that over 50% of the businesses believed that cloud computing would enable them to focus more on business strategies and not their IT related business processes. However, security and data compliance remain as the biggest concern for cloud computing. For example, an European company which outsource to a US-based cloud provider, the data should be subjected to European’s or US’s data protection regulations, as data is usually companies’ most important asset which contains all the information about products and customers. Therefore, it is of no doubt that cloud-based technologies opens up new business opportunities without businesses having to commit to heavy investments and expertise. But there are also questions regarding the security of data and their reliance as compared to self-owned or local server. 

The figure below pretty much summed up all the numbers related to "cloud".

Sources:

Clouds, big data, and smart assets: Ten tech-enabled business trends to watch, McKinsey Quarterly, August 2010, https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Clouds_big_data_and_smart_assets_Ten_tech-enabled_business_trends_to_watch_2647

Storing Data In The Cloud Raises Compliance Challenges, Alan Murphy, 2012, Forbes Tech, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/01/19/storing-data-in-the-cloud-raises-compliance-challenges/

Eight ways that cloud computing will change business, Dion Hinchcliffe, 2009, http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hinchcliffe/eight-ways-that-cloud-computing-will-change-business/488

Cloud Future Business Costs Innovation, Accenture Research & Insights, Accenture, 2011