Benefits of Cloud Computing for Business

Over the recent years, 'The Cloud' has gained more main stream traction especially in the consumer market. If you have backed up your phone, sent yourself an email with an attachment or used Office 365, you have used the cloud. This has essentially been a byproduct of faster and cheaper internet connections, where not too long-ago physical storage devices were used to back up our important things, but since have been replaced with the cloud. The examples given so far have come more from a consumer centric point of view, and this will be continuing for businesses going forward as well. 

 Cloud computing for business falls mainly into three categories:

 1.      Software as a Service (SaaS): Probably the easiest to get acquainted with, as it is always accessible through the internet. A basic example would be using Microsoft Word where the cloud provider installs and operates the application within the cloud and users access it from any device that has an internet connection.

2.      Platform as a Service (PaaS): This is where a business can theoretically have its company development run through the virtual platform, saving time and resources. PaaS providers, such as Microsoft Azure, offer a variety of solutions for storage, servers, and operating systems. 

3.      Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Businesses can now run applications on an IaaS provider, which can be rented and accessed over the internet. IaaS providers are currently Microsoft and Amazon are currently the leader in this category.

There tends to be overlap within the three categories for potential services. For example, here at Milliman Integrate, our solutions can fall under both Software and Platform as a Service, where we replace manual spreadsheets with our integrated solution using Microsoft Azure's platform.

Flexibility/Collaboration

With the scalability of cloud capacity, businesses can scale up and down accordingly as their needs are met. For example, retailers can crank their cloud capacity needs up in December when a relatively higher percentage of traffic and revenue comes in. The flexibility that cloud services brings in the "as a service" business model cannot be done when owning your data center.       

Collaborating with teams across the globe, along with trying to get ideas and concepts to work together has been made easier than it’s ever been before. Furthermore, this allows business owners and employees to work from anywhere. This means a company can potentially be run from the other side of the world.

Cutting Fat/Increasing Lean Muscle

The growth of the whole cloud computing environment could be considered analogous to when ATMS started emerging initially in banks, the early adopters started using it first and more banks implemented it along the way. 

An early adopter of cloud computing capabilities would be the classic case of Netflix. It's well understood how 'disrupted' the Blockbuster business model. The Netflix cloud journey, which can be read here, has continued to evolve rapidly, incorporating many new resource-hungry features and relying on ever-growing volumes of data. Supporting this rapid growth would be extremely difficult out of their own data centers, as servers would get racked up way too quick. The scalability of the cloud allows thousands of virtual servers and petabytes of storage within minutes.

Business Modernization

Being proactive and having that entrepreneurial spirit helps improve future modernized business. Businesses evolve to be forward thinkers as the stagnant business tends to die out. 

Moreover, disaster recovery on the cloud can be considered more reliable compared physical data centers which may break down, and the reduction of carbon emissions to help protect the environment with less paper wasting and plastic hard drives.

As the Great One, Wayne Gretzky played hockey by, "You don't want to be where the play is, you want to be where the play is going to be". This can be certainly transferred over to the business world where companies are looking mainly to gain revenue and market share.

Hopefully this gives a little understanding about the benefits of cloud computing!

Paul Kandola