How to Adopt Cloud Computing for Your Business

The topic of what the cloud exactly is — and what it is not — is exceedingly well trod territory. More than a few well known journalists and intellectuals have waxed poetic about the economic and global implications of cloud data storage, discussed what is “the cloud” and cloud computing’s benefits and setbacks, as well as its benefits. But what does it mean to adopt adopt cloud computing for your business?

While at first implementing cloud computing to risk-free component of your business, including storage and unified communications, is important, businesses should not jump into cloud computing without a larger strategy to drive this change across the entire organization. Storage is only a small piece of the puzzle; sales, marketing, and customer service can all be managed on cloud platforms while also integrating social, mobile, and big data analytics. If cloud computing is done right, the benefits can be seen immediately.

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However, one should not underestimate the complexity of integrating cloud computing to your current on-premise systems. If your various systems are not properly talking to one another, the whole system will collapse. The best route is to select a complete application suite that is engineered for integration between applications both on the cloud and on-premises.

Additionally, bring yourself up to speed on software licensing to fully understand both infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) cloud delivery models. While each model has its pros and cons, where the complexity comes in is how software manufacturers address cloud use in their software licenses. Some charge by the number of users, while others charge per processor the software runs on or the actual usage metrics. The bottom line is: understand what your needs are before deploying third-party software in the cloud.

Cloud computing is growing – at a very fast speed – and business needs for it continue to grow as well. Every day, new devices connect to the cloud: security systems, cars, and appliances. This personal-user growth pushes software developers to become more innovative, and vice versa. It’s indeed a global development that seems to have no ceiling.

However, how big is the cloud? There is no exact answer, as many companies like Google and Amazon refuse to place a number of their respective capacity in fear of losing the edge to competitors. However, in 2012, an educated guess was 1 exabyte, which is 1,099,511,627,776 megabytes. To put this number into perspective, a three-minute mp3 is roughly 3 megabytes, so 366.5 billion songs could fit in the cloud. However, this number will continue to grow as the demand increases.

Whether cloud computing is right for your business depends on your specific needs. However, in the long run, moving your services to the cloud is cheaper and virtually adjustable to your needs. Spending on cloud services is estimated at $47.4 billion last year and, according to IDC, will grow at a rate of 23.5 percent per year through 2017. Services become cheaper and cheaper, your data is monitored 24/7, and – excluding the occasional outage – the system is always running.

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