How Is Cloud Computing The Driver Of Digital Disruption?
The way cloud computing is providing the reusability of IT resources for maintaining large databases is simply unprecedented. Enterprises are increasingly directing efforts toward cloud platforms to hone their digital strategies.
The way cloud computing is providing the reusability of IT resources for maintaining large databases is simply unprecedented. Enterprises are increasingly directing efforts toward cloud platforms to hone their digital strategies. Cloud computing is helping businesses in many ways – developing and hosting complex applications, expanding their core services on demand, and reducing investments on large scale infrastructure.
According to a recent forecast by the International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide public cloud services spending is slated to reach $160 billion in 2018, up from 23.2% in 2017. The same study expects this cloud services spending to rise to $277 billion in 2021. Furthermore, Software as a Service (SaaS) will be the largest cloud computing category, capturing nearly two thirds of all public cloud spending in 2018.
Today organizations including manufacturing and retail, media and entertainment, finance and insurance, telecommunications, software and IT are leveraging public cloud services. Cloud technology is therefore being seen as a way forward to seamlessly bring in collaboration, convergence, and disruption for increasing competitive intensity. This clearly shows businesses are striving hard to become digitally empowered thanks to cloud computing.
The rise of IaaS and PaaS
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a cloud computing model where a virtual infrastructure is provided to organizations by external cloud providers. This platform helps businesses outsource for storages, servers, data center space and cloud networking components connected through the internet. Other examples of IaaS include automated operations such as backup, recovery, monitoring, clustering , internal networking, webhosting etc. IaaS service providers are responsible for building servers and storage, networking firewalls, and physical datacenter. Some of the key cloud service providers are: Microsoft Azzure – global network of Microsoft managed data centers; Google Cloud Platform – a suite of Google cloud computing services, HostPresto – FileMaker webhosting.
Platform as a service (PaaS), on the other hand, is an environment that enables cloud users to install and host datasets, development tools and business analytics applications, in addition to creating and maintaining necessary hardware. PaaS indicates that the focus of innovation is shifting even further towards software development. PaaS simplifies the deployment and management of various web applications along with making them more resilient and functional. With the help of PaaS, it is now possible to deploy a web application with a 128MB memory allocation, and double it when needed. PaaS makes it possible to size and scale applications on demand, which makes it easier for enterprises to manage their overall environment. The prominent players that offer PaaS are: Amazon Web Services, Oracle Cloud, Salesforce etc.
When it comes to cloud computing, data takes the center stage because the digital disruption demands the proper analysis of data. It is crucial for businesses to understand how data is collected, where it is collected and how they find the analytics tools. In this regard, Oracle has a large and popular SaaS portfolio that helps companies collect tremendous amount of customer data. Furthermore, Oracle is rapidly expanding its set of cloud development services.
Advancement of the next wave
Just like the emerging technologies such as Artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), automation and big data are playing a key role in this digitally-led revolution, cloud technology is leading from the front. Investing in cloud-first will be highly effective in terms of future-proofing infrastructure. According to a prediction made by Gartner, by 2020, a no cloud policy is as rare as no-internet policy to day.
The cloud has come a long way in its evolution, and the current popularity of cloud hybrid model is effectively meeting business goals by leveraging scalability, performance, development and budgeting. A recent survey by EMC (now acquired by Dell) shows that companies that aggressively adopt hybrid cloud are 3 times more likely than non-adopters to be approaching their digital business and infrastructure readiness goals.
As we know innovation is at the heart of constantly evolving digital technology paradigm, cloud model itself acts as catalyst of innovation. In order for organizations to adapt their business models in the digital arena, cloud offers a platform for tech experimentation, rapid development, deployment and distribution. Today, testing new project is cost-effective and low-risk, and deployment times are faster. Cloud is helping in innovating like a startup and deliver like an enterprise.
When it comes to automation and efficiency, cloud computing is aptly facilitating interoperability. This means when systems are transitioned to the cloud platform, their ability to integrate with other systems goes up considerably. This encourages different kinds of innovations involving better communication, data analytics, mobility and customer interaction. An important consequent milestone of cloud computing is has allowed businesses to “dematerialize” their resources. For example, Uber has become one of the biggest taxi service companies without even owning a single taxi. Facebook is one of the largest online content platforms but doesn’t own any content. Similarly, Airbnb is the largest holder of room inventory but does not own a single room. Thus, all these companies were succeeded because somewhere cloud provided their business models technology differentiation.