In an article on how the cloud is set to change business ecosystems, Onkar Sharma, talks about different aspects of the cloud, the types of deployment models, implementation challenges commonly faces and how organizations are embracing the cloud. Some of the reasons why we see rapid change in the business ecosystem because of the cloud, he says, are as below.
Pay-As-You-Go Model
The cloud reduces the significant upfront capital expenditure which is needed to purchase and maintain IT infrastructure like hardware and software systems. Pricing in the cloud is done on a usage or subscription based model which converts fixed into variable costs.
Multi-tenancy
The cloud resources run in multi-tenancy mode which means multiple users can access the infrastructure simultaneously from different organizations.
Elasticity of Resources
Services of the cloud are available on-demand which allows customers to upscale/downscale capacity without incurring any capital expenditure. Service providers of the cloud are able to juggle between servers and data centers to shift resource utilization as per the demand patterns and user specific SLAs.
Ease of Implementation
Using the cloud based applications is much easier than building new applications and data centers.
On-demand Self-service
The most important feature of the cloud is that users can use computing capabilities as and when they require the same without requiring any human intervention from the service provider of the cloud.
Reduces Carbon Footprint
Technological advancements and financial limitations are indirectly contributing to a decrease in the number of servers and energy consumption.
