Future of Cloud Computing - Five Reasons

Five Reasons Why Cloud Computing is the Future

1. The Cloud Boosts Speed and Agility

If there's one fundamental truth about today's business environment, it's that it's evolving at an ever-accelerating pace.

To offer an example: in 2007, Blackberry ruled the smartphone roost, and Apple's biggest seller was its iPod. By 2020, Blackberry was only a brand licensed to other phone manufacturers, and Apple was selling over $110 billion worth of iPhones every year.

Every business is under pressure to respond more quickly to changing business conditions. Unfortunately, traditional IT processes are a poor match for today's speed. Provisioning resources commonly takes weeks or months, thereby slowing the reflexes of the business. With cloud computing, resources are available in minutes, which means companies can respond to new market developments much more rapidly.

Dovetailed with the inherent agility of cloud resources is DevOps, which realigns software development and deployment to create continuous integration and continuous delivery. The cloud enables the DevOps CI/CD cycle that keeps software capabilities, performance, and reliability always current and always running on an optimized set of resources.

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2. It Perpetuates Innovation

Success in today's business environment requires more than just speed, though. Just as critical is innovation — the ability to develop new offerings, evaluate their potential market adoption, and then roll out the successful ones while culling the losers.

Here, too, cloud computing is a much better match than traditional IT infrastructure approaches. Because resources are available so quickly, it's easy to experiment with a new offering very quickly. Companies can obtain user feedback immediately, rather than waiting months to get something into a market trial.

Cloud also supports automation that helps drive innovation. It combines with tools like low-code and no-code applications to enable a broader range of people to develop a broader range of new digital services.

To quote the old Ginsu knives infomercials, "but wait, there's more." For the trials that become winners, cloud computing's easy scalability makes it easy to grow the offering and address more users. And because cloud computing offers on-demand usage pricing, trials that turn up duds are easy to terminate.

3. It Helps Manage Costs

Another reality of traditional IT infrastructure is how doggone expensive it is. Infrastructure requires physical resources: servers, storage, and network. But beyond that, there's lots of expense in operating those resources: headcount, facilities, and power.

And most IT organizations aren't very efficient when it comes to infrastructure. Procurement happens infrequently and in small amounts, so resource costs are high. Operational processes are typically not automated, so labor costs are also high.

By contrast, the big cloud providers buy in bulk. Think of them as the Costco of computer resources. And because they operate at such scale, they have to invest in process automation. They couldn't possibly hire or afford enough staff to manage their hyperscale data centers manually.

Those lower costs flow through to users. Most IT organizations can achieve significant savings by using cloud computing, although, to be fair, not everyone agrees with this perspective. In my experience, though, most IT organizations cannot meet the big cloud providers' cost structure.

4. It Enables Application Resiliency

Application uptime has always been critical. These days, though, availability is more critical than ever. That's because more companies are embracing digital transformation to become digital enterprises, where their customers and suppliers interact and engage via IT-based mechanisms (e.g., mobile apps).

This move to digital makes application resiliency critical. Simply stated, applications need to stay available, even in the face of infrastructure failure.

Most on-premise applications demonstrate poor resiliency. Because the equipment is so expensive (see the previous section), most applications cannot afford redundancy, so they contain SPOFs (single points of failure). When infrastructure fails, the application goes down and stays down until the infrastructure is repaired.

Cloud computing changes the resiliency equation dramatically. First, it's easy to obtain additional infrastructure resources. So if something breaks, it's trivial to restart the application on new resources.

But application resiliency goes beyond fast access to replacement kits. Because resources are readily available, and organizations only pay for what they use, it's cost-effective to avoid SPOF application design and use redundant resources. If something breaks, the application continues operating on the still-working resources, allowing operations to address the problem as a background task.

5. It's the Future of Your Workforce

One group has figured out that cloud computing is the future: employees. No one wants their skills stuck in obsolete technology because that limits career prospects.

So failing to embrace cloud computing means your staff will conclude their future career growth requires moving to a company that has embraced the cloud. And potential employees, i.e., candidates, are unlikely to join a company they view as stuck in the past.

Therefore, to ensure you have a motivated IT organization, it's essential to implement forward-looking plans that involve cloud adoption. Naturally, that means building skills in both current and future employees, which requires education and training. As always, Simplilearn makes it convenient for your employees to learn cutting-edge cloud computing skills.

Well, there you have it. Five reasons cloud computing represents the future. More important, cloud computing represents your future. Demands on IT organizations are only going to grow, so it's critical to prepare now. If you're only starting on your cloud journey, don't hesitate. You can't afford to delay any longer.