How cloud computing can drive business agility
Agility is the ability of a business to adapt rapidly and cost efficiently in response to changes in the business environment. Business agility can be achieved by quickly adapting goods and services to meet customer demands. Basically, agility is a concept that incorporates the ideas of flexibility, balance, adaptability, and coordination under one umbrella.
In an increasingly challenging business environment, enterprises can no longer expect to thrive on the basis of existing business and IT strategies. Unlike the time-consuming, expensive application modernization projects of a decade ago, transformation initiatives based on social, mobile, analytics and the cloud are cost-effective and efficient. The cloud, in particular, provides a natural platform for optimizing existing IT systems to increase operational efficiencies while driving business agility and growth.
So, let’s have a look at how cloud computing strategy drives business agility:
- Faster time-to-market – cloud computing allows companies to significantly decrease the time it takes to provision and deprovision IT infrastructure, speeding delivery of IT projects that are critical to revenue growth or cost reduction. While a physical server could take days or weeks to procure and provision, a cloud server takes minutes.
- Automation – cloud computing simplifies provisioning, de-provisioning and re-deploying resources through automation. The efficiency of cloud computing reduces the amount of time an IT systems administrator has to spend on managing and supporting infrastructure.
- Pay for the number of resources you use and need – There is no denial that cloud computing increases the efficiency and speed of business processes and transactions. The pay-per-use model of cloud computing offers its subscribers the opportunity to either rent or subscribe to the platforms, systems, infrastructure and data services which can be rapidly scaled up or down on need basis. This eliminates the risk of committing a lot of finances on insignificant or less useful resources which are required to store these entities themselves.
- Faster innovation – cloud computing allows companies to support an increased pace of product development and marketing programs that better align IT infrastructure and management costs with the goals and objectives of the business. The flexible infrastructure that cloud offers translates into businesses enhancing their agility rather than being inhibitors of the change. It allows organizations to step up or tone down their operations to support their business goals such as attracting and retaining new customers or speeding up the time-to-market for latest services.
- No need to wait for hardware and software resources – The cloud makes everything accessible via the Internet. Conventional business processes need weeks or months at times to set up hardware and develop software. On the contrary, such setup can be ready in just a matter of few hours in the cloud.
- Flexibility and scalability – Due to the pay-per-use flexibility of the cloud, end-users are able to scale fast based on the demands of the business. Among the common workloads that require on-demand scalability we can name testing and development, load testing, seasonal spikes in traffic, a new application etc.
Business agility is critical to the survival of many companies, and cloud computing does move a company significantly along this path. What are your thoughts?
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