Cloud Computing – The next big thing or the Emperor’s New Clothes?
Cloud services have emerged as a genuine threat to established hardware and software providers as well as to the many thousands of IT professionals who have made their living selling and supporting these products over the last twenty or more years.
This threat makes ICT investment decisions by businesses particularly challenging as we are encouraged by one group to stick with the tried and true and by another to throw away the old and bring in the new.
How can the average business customer judge the importance of a new technology or the continued relevance of existing technology choices to their business?
While the answer to this question can often be complex, at its heart is a simple challenge “What is the purpose of this technology?”
This three part series assesses the importance of cloud services to business by looking at whether a particular service reduces costs and/or improves businesses performance when compared to the existing way of doing things.
Part One of this series addresses Infrastructure as a Service – where traditional ICT services such as storage and processing power are provided.
Parts Two and Three will address:
Platform as a Service – where organisations can purchase the toolkit necessary to build and operate their own software
Software as a Service – where organisations can access software such as email or office productivity tools. (more…)