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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

June - 2011 - issue > Technology

Platforms on the cloud – The ultimate weapons of mass disruption

Ashish Bhagwat
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Ashish Bhagwat
The Cloud Revolution
I do not have to emphasize that cloud computing is turning out to be one of the big revolutions in Information Technology. First, we had Mainframes, then, we moved on to the minicomputers, then to PCs (the client-server era), and then the web era for the last few years. The significance of every one of these eras, (and distinguishing aspect relative to other events of magnitude) was that it was not just the technological breakthrough but also the great business model changer and innovation enabler.

Cloud Computing has brought about changes in the way organizations look at the technology-driven business. It has opened up new possibilities in the business models. It provides great levers for small businesses to compete with larger enterprises, and for larger enterprises to get more agile and efficient. It has enabled easier access to the technology that otherwise would have been out of reach financially and sometimes physically. It has also enabled access for the business to the prospects, customers and users. At the same time, it also offers the much needed abstraction of technology so that the business can focus on business decisions and not get lost in the myriad of technical approaches and constraints.

Hence, it is not surprising that most organizations are today asking as to how they could move to cloud. It is just a plain way of asking how they could take advantage of Cloud computing in the context of their business. So, how do you approach your decision?

Moving to cloud? Options and Tradeoffs
Out of the above, IaaS and SaaS are easy to understand for most. They translates to a simpler own v/s lease kind of decision matrix, and typically this comparison in Capex v/x Opex decision making is easier to formulate. Also, the choice is very obvious in terms of infrastructure level alternative (for IaaS) and Application level alternative (for SaaS) against their enterprise level counterparts.


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