Cloud Computing – Explicitly Redefined For Enterprises
Companies are moving quickly to leverage the cloud for the services that most readily bring the greatest business value in the short term. And not surprisingly, the greatest growth in the cloud is in the CRM and collaboration tools sector.
Specifically, in the enterprise segment, the major focus is being put on complex engagements. Strictly speaking, complex engagements involve cutting-edge enterprises that are migrating to the cloud, and when these enterprises move to the cloud, there are facets of different technology and infrastructure that need to be handled. Such facets usually include large datacenters, and special focus is put on how to consolidate and order them in an accessible way so that different segments of the community can have access to the specific data they need.
A cloud is a paradigm in which one can get access to any resource or service on any device, anywhere on the planet. Keeping an enterprise in mind, the aforementioned definition of a cloud is slightly twisted. From an enterprise perspective, if one looks into the technologies, one sees that several services are running simultaneously. These services are powered by a portfolio of applications. What an enterprise is doing is rationalizing an application portfolio and keeping a lookout for the entire application portfolio – which applications should it keep at the core, which should it allow access to by partners, and which should be delivered by outside providers. For an enterprise, these questions are intelligently addressed to by a cloud service.
But the story does not stop here. Because of an architecture known as multi-tenancy, the enterprise does not have to pay for all copies of applications being used. On the contrary, there is one application which everyone shares, but which is flexible enough for everyone to customize to their specific needs. This means that applications are elastic and upgrades are taken care of on behalf of the business.
The world is now on the next wave of validating prototypes and searching for new applications that can help an enterprise when it enters the cloud world. For an enterprise, those are the applications that best leverage the cloud, those which necessitate a large scale (either geographic or computational) and entail a short entry or exit time into or out of the market. It seems that business models have finally matched their flow to the cloud.
By Haris Smith
