Over the past few weeks I have been talking to a lot of people about cloud computing.  Only a few months ago, it was really something that people knew very little about and possibly even considered to be too risky.  There were a lot of unknowns and they are still there in many cases, however, what has changed is the perception of the people.  A lot of people now live in an online world and it only makes sense to take their applications online.

Yesterday, I had three new deals pass by my desk.  They were of varying sizes but they all made me think about how important a cloud based solution would be to the customer. Here are some things which I was reminded about:

• Cloud allows for flexibility

• With cloud based computing it is very easy to turn services on and off as you require them.  I know of one company who uses an HR application for 360 Reviews.  As the reviews only happen twice a year the server doesn’t need to be very powerful for the rest of the year.  Therefore, the company pays for more powerful processing power when demand increases and they save money by reducing the processing power then the application is not as heavily used.  This is also known as elastic computing, as you can increase and decrease your requirements with great ease.

• Cloud allows for growth

• A comment which use to be quite popular within the consumer PC market was “It doesn’t matter what you buy, it will be out of date by the time it leaves the shelf”.  This is not a comment I hear so much today as I think that people treat computers with a limited life and expect to replace them every 2 to 3 years.  With the cloud, this issue goes away as you are typically running on the most up to date technology which is typically backed by a multi-million dollar investment.
• Companies which go through growth often have problems with their technology not being able to support their users.  Every new user equates to a reduction in the performance of a server.  However, with the flexibility of the cloud users can be added with no impact on performance which would be costly to the company going through growth.

• Cloud allows for a smaller budget

• In many cases, with cloud computing, you only have to pay for what you use.  Today, if you were going to purchase a new server there would be a few things that you would need to consider.  These are typically around capacity.  Common questions would be around the need for memory, future disk space requirements and so forth.  Most of this would be guess work at the best.  With cloud based computing this is no longer an issue as you just pay for what you use.