100% Cloud Based Companies? Yes, it’s possible!

Everyone is talking about the cloud. Business applications are moving to the cloud. The shift from traditional software models to Internet based solutions has steadily gained momentum over the last 10 years. The next decade promises new ways of collaboration, via cloud computing and mobile devices.

Life before cloud computing for traditional business applications was always quite complicated, not to mention expensive. The amount and variety of hardware and software required to run them was daunting. You needed a whole team of experts to install, configure, test, run, secure, and update them.

Cloud computing is becoming ubiquitous in today’s businesses, particularly when taking into account the rising popularity of free SaaS applications like Dropbox and Google Apps, among others. For IT decision makers, dreams of migrating all back-end and mission-critical applications to the cloud is now becoming a reality.

The majority of companies are experimenting with cloud computing. For many businesses, cloud computing means cost savings and greater flexibility. But the most revolutionary aspect of the cloud is that it is creating a new generation of businesses, designed to run entirely on the cloud. These businesses are 100% cloud.

Today, my company operates as a 100% cloud company, we have no physical servers. Internally, all of our servers that support our employees are 100% SaaS based. We have standardize on SaaS based applications, SalesForce for CRM and outsourced exchange as well as other SaaS based business applications.  Externally, all of our customer applications leverage the fastest growing IaaS Managed Cloud platform and we then deliver pure SaaS or PaaS based systems to our customers. This allows us to achieve massive scalability while controlling our costs.

The single most important benefit of becoming a 100% cloud based company is for us to focus on our core competency. Cloud computing has eliminated the management of traditional software and hardware headaches, that now becomes the responsibility of an experienced SaaS vendor like Salesforce.com. IaaS now lets us leverage industry specific experts that manage a highly scalable, redundant and secure cloud computing platform and we pay for only what we use.  Now, we can focus on what’s most important for our company: creating the best software in the education industry.

The latest innovations in cloud computing are making our business applications even more mobile and collaborative. As consumers, we now expect targeted information to be pushed to us in real time, and business applications in the cloud will be able to provide this to us. Think about what it will be like when it is as easy to keep up with our work as it is to keep up with our personal life within Facebook.

Once more organizations become comfortable with cloud computing, and after all mental barriers are broken, the progression towards 100% cloud adoption will increase. With that being said, a general evolution to 100% cloud may take time but some day will become a reality.

Photo source: https://www.sxc.hu/photo/1172174