The Cloud at Your Service

The Cloud at Your Service The Cloud at Your Service Cloud computing is information technology (It) offered as a service. It eliminates the need for organizations to build and maintain expensive data centers. It enables organizations to stand up new systems quickly and easily. It provides elastic resources that allow applications to scale as needed in response to market demands. Its pay- as-you-go rental model allows organizations to defer costs. It increases business con- tinuity by providing inexpensive disaster-recovery options. It reduces the need for organizations to maintain a large It staff. It is critically important: without it, most organizations can’t function effectively. And yet, except in a few special cases, It typically doesn’t give its organization a competitive advantage—it isn’t a core capability. Modern economics are driving organizations to externalize noncore capabilities. If the noncore capability available from an external provider is more cost effective, then it should be externalized. by this criterion, It is a perfect candidate for externalization. Prior to the introduction of cloud computing, organizations externalized It by outsourcing to It service providers. but It service provider relationships have never been particularly elastic. Cloud computing offers many benefits over the traditional It outsourcing model because of the on-demand nature of the cloud business model. organizations engage cloud-computing service providers on an application- by-application basis. It’s not an all-or-nothing proposition.