Dawn of the Cloud Age

With the dawn of the boot-strap economy, the spending pattern of businesses, big and small has vastly evolved. Gone are the days when the boss was interested in sales figures and targets. Today, the impetus is on strait jacketed spending to stabilise the bottom line, despite planned cuts in capex and definitely, opex. The path to EBITDA nirvana runs through the garden of IT optimisation. The migration to cloud services and optimisation in IT expenditure, can only be through robust cloud solutions, as integrity of the service provided by businesses, cannot be compromised. Moving the humble e-mail from an on-premise service to a hosted service, with the consequent upgrade in anti-spam and anti-virus and reduction in complexity and mobility support, the benefits of cloud migration was visible from the very beginning. Small businesses were quick to latch on to the goodies and demanded more and more innovations of the cloud. Cloud service providers were quick to innovate and provide services which were integral to the business like payroll, collaboration etc. They also diversified into large scale development of ERP applications, to upgrade traditional on-site processes to convenient cloud based ERP services. It is also not coincidental that the influx of cloud development and cloud development services happened along with the steady increase in data being collected and collated. The leveraging of this data could have only been effective, if the collaborative tools to access this data, collate and analyse the same, were geo neutral and platform agnostic. Also, the increase in opex, due to the large data and CRM requirements had to be obviated quickly, before the cost benefits accrued out of data analytics and lower customer retention costs, were lost to the higher IT spend. Cloud services came literally as the silver lining in the cloud, where salesforce CRM, testing & development and even marketing have migrated to a structured cloud based solution, not to mention the shifting of the onus of disaster recovery and data replication, from the business to the cloud service provider. It is but natural that this level of promise and low entry barrier would mean a large number of cloud software development companies would join the fray. These developers provide customised solutions to the individual business, while also leveraging on the standardised platforms available. While the cost benefits are pretty much obvious for a cloud enabled ecosystem, for any business, the advantages of the technology per se cannot be underestimated. Some of these are as follows: - 1. Document Management 2. Disaster recovery 3. Automatic software updates 4. Enhanced security 5. Flexibility 6. Increased competitiveness 7. Lower energy consumption 8. Rapid scalability 9. Faster implementation 10. Increased business agility Slowly the era of cloud based solutions is moving towards the development of customised applications in the app format, for the various cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, Azure etc. Even though business automation may be the core competence of many service providers, the market is divided into multiple niche solution providers, specialising in different platforms. It would be prudent for any business to quickly migrate to the cloud, while being cautious about the platform they choose, with a long term perspective.

Pratik Gaikwad Content writing