The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven
than women’s fashion (Larry Ellison, chairman, Oracle). One of the most growing
IT trends is Cloud Computing.
Really? A new Cloud server is added for every 600 smartphones or 120
tablets in use. AMD reported that 70% of business are either currently using a Cloud
Computing solution, or they are investigating one, meaning that they are at
least interested in the Cloud if not future advocates of it. 90% of Microsoft’s
2011 R&D budget was spent on Cloud Computing strategy and products.
Is it not enough? U.S. federal agencies adopted a ‘cloud-first’ policy
and since then 48% of U.S. government agencies moved a workflow to the Cloud. Cloud
providers have increased personnel from zero in 2007 to over 550,000 in 2010. It
is a creation of a huge amount of job positions, which means there are a lot of
people working on making Cloud Services secure and reliable.
However, when it comes to the perception of the Cloud, we have quite
interesting data about what people believe Cloud Computing is. A recent study
revealed that:
- 95% have used Cloud but don´t know it,
- 54% claim they have never used the Cloud,
- 51% believe stormy weather has an effect on Cloud Computing,
- 29% think the Cloud has something to do with weather,
- 16% correctly think the Cloud is a place to store, access and share data.
So what Cloud Computing is? “There was a time when every household, town, farm or village had its
own water well. Today, shared public utilities give us access to clean water by
simply turning on the tap; cloud computing works in a similar fashion. Just
like water from the tap in your kitchen, cloud computing services can be turned
on or off quickly as needed. Like at the water company, there is a team of
dedicated professionals making sure the service provided is safe, secure and
available on a 24/7 basis. When the tap isn't on, not only are you saving
water, but you aren't paying for resources you don't currently need (2010,
Vivek Kundra, Federal CIO, United States Government).”
One of the Cloud computing models, SaaS (Software as a Service), is the
layer directly consumed by customers. SaaS gives opportunity to small and
midsized businesses to afford a great software solution without investments on
the infrastructure, development platform or skilled manpower. SaaS should be
used if owners of businesses want to focus on their businesses rather than
wasting time in replacing broken pieces of hardware or managing IT
infrastructure. There is just one requirement – a computer with a browser. It
is a big plus that no software installation is needed.
Cloud Computing gives a lot of advantages. There are some
examples of that. The U.S. Federal Government saved about $5.5 billion per year
by shifting to Cloud Services. A recent survey of more than 3500 IT decision
makers from different parts of the world showed that more than 90% of all
companies saw at least one area of improvement in their IT department since
they moved to the Cloud and 64% of companies have reduced waste and have
lowered energy consumption levels after shifting to Cloud Computing.
We are facing a huge potential of this technology:
- 425 million people worldwide use Gmail and all email users send over 204 million messages every minute.
- 150 million people use Apple´s iCloud. Moreover, Apple receives about 47,000 app downloads each minute.
- 50 million people use Dropbox to save more than 1 million files every 3 minutes.
To add more, 30% of small and mid-size businesses used Cloud software in 2011. Forrester
predicts a 6.2% growth in business and government purchases of information
technologies in 2014 and even further growth in 2015, up to 8.1%. That growth
is consistent with forecasts from GigaOM Research, which expects the total
worldwide addressable market for Cloud Computing to reach $158.8 billion by
2014, an increase of 126.5% from 2011. The Cloud Computing market is expected
to reach $241 billion by 2020.
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