Clouds On The Horizon?

The growing world-wide economic tsunami will likely make planning for IT investments even more cloudy than “normal”… Or will it? Businesses of all sizes, industries and locations will need to review their IT plans and decide what projects must go forward, which can be deferred and which may need a different approach to implement. And, how do we manage the budget to do even more with less? Not saying that this will be easy but, fortunately, there is a growing option that may help to ease the crisis and maybe even provide a silver lining … “Cloud Computing.”
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Cloud Computing, one of the current terms being used to describe the ability to have an IT application delivered from outside of a businesses own data infrastructure — by a third-party providers. And such third parties also have names. Cloud Computing also is being called “Soft-ware as a Service (SaaS (News - Alert))”, “Hosted”, “Managed”, and also well-known terms like “Outsourced” or “Out-tasked”, etc. The opportunities provided to users of such a Cloud Services are manifold: The flexibility to quickly scale-up (or down) the size/scale of a service; the ability to test multiple applications/solutions at small scale and see which work; add/remove served locations rapidly, to try new applications in a linearly scalable manner and to provide a disaster recovery option.

And usually, these can be tried, with minimal capital investments, as an operating expense that grows with usage (usually number of subscribers/users or transactions/volumes).

So, how can Cloud Computing be a Silver Lining? Well, certainly there are good and very attractive candidate IT projects that will fall outside the available capital budget and/or resources able to support/implement/develop. Perhaps those projects should also become your firm’s entre into Cloud Computing. Some candidate “Cloud” projects might be:

• How can mobility/remote workers be supported with a UC solution?
• How might a multi-media response center be trialed for a small division to see if it might work across the business?
• CRM system changes or upgrades since implemented 10 years ago?

Not only large enterprises but, equally, small and medium-sized businesses can consider implementing solutions deployed in the Cloud, delivered as a service, rapidly, securely and cost-effectively.

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BY David Yedwab
Source：TMCnet.com

David Yedwab is a Founding Partner in Market Strategy and Analytics Partners (News - Alert) LLC. Contact him at 908-879-2835 or david.yedwab@mktstrategy-analytics.com

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