Luchi Gabriel Manescu | Cloud Tweaks
A recent survey has showed that 70% of Australian companies are planning to increase their spending in cloud services. The trend may be very strong in Australia but it is mirrored on a bigger or smaller trend all over the world and we are starting to see more and more companies abandoning the more traditional local software and storage solutions for their cloud alternatives. The reason for the move vary from country to country and from company to company but a eventually they do come to several common denominators.
Lower IT Costs
The biggest reason why many companies choose to make the move to the cloud is the opportunity to lower the capital expenditure or CAPEX. This brings two benefits that need to be considered. The first is that the initial investment is for the exact services or storage that the company needs but both of these features can be very easily increased because of the scalable computing feature of the cloud. The second benefit of lowering the CAPEX on IT is that companies can allocate more funds to research and development so, with the rapid development of the cloud we can expect to see also a faster growth of innovative products and projects.
The Move Frees Up Other Resources
The second advantage of moving to the cloud is that, besides freeing up part of the financial resources, there are other resources that are no longer dedicated to maintaining a complex on site IT structure.
What exactly those resources are depends from one company to another but there are a few commonalities. The IT experts are now freed to tackle more customer related parts of the business thus providing a seamless experience for both company employees and customers. Also the higher management specialists no longer need to focus their time on dealing with IT issues since these are taken care of by whatever cloud services providers are working with the company.
Cloud Services Are at an All Time Maximum
One of the biggest reasons why it was so difficult for cloud services to be adopted by companies was the fact that they were a relatively new technology and it had not track record. However the technology has finally reached that critical point where there are enough providers that basically any need a company may have is covered by someone in the cloud. Also there are so many competitors in every niche that have found the perfect way to use cloud services that those who still chose to stand back risk falling back.
SaaS Offers Undeniable Opportunities
The most common cloud services used today is the software as a service model (SaaS). We are already seeing Google and Microsoft battling it out for a piece of the office suite needs but there are even more services that SaaS provides. And companies moving to the software as a service solution are already seeing lower upfront costs, permanent access to software, basically care free upgrades and automatic integration with the in house systems.
