5 Ways Cloud Is Changing The Application World
Cloud is the most talked about term in I.T. circles today. And for good reason. Never before has there been such a profound shift in the way people do business. From eliminating large capital expenditures for compute & storage to providing productivity tools an ever-mobile workforce, cloud technology is making business faster and more profitable than ever.
Where cloud has had one of the biggest impacts however is in the application space. With software previously being an expensive and often long-term investment due to how it was offered, cloud has transformed both the way applications are procured and how they’re deployed.
Here’s 5 Ways Cloud Is Changing The Application World:
- Faster Deployments. With applications being centrally delivered via data connections and subscriptions, new applications can be trialled for free or bought and deployed in minutes rather than needing expensive ‘down time’ for new software rollouts to users and/or servers.
- Lower Cost. This factor is two-fold. The cloud application provider can leverage powerful compute & storage infrastructure to bring the ‘cost of delivery’ down (and serve magnitudes more customers) but it also means that those customers don’t have to have their own expensive infrastructure to effectively run the applications either.
- Greater Efficiency. Until recently, I.T. teams had to try to accurately predict future storage and compute requirements well into the future for all of the company’s expected software use. With dynamically available applications via the cloud, onsite compute & storage isn’t needed in any great volume, nor is the requirement to spend three year’s capital expenditure on software that might not be suitable in 12 months time.
- Faster Application Performance. Cloud-driven applications are generally much faster than local applications due to the vast amount of compute resources available. With optimised compute environments hosting the applications, the results are incomparable with local servers that often struggle to do many different tasks at once.
- Latest & Greatest. The dynamics of cloud-based applications means that SaaS (Software as a Service) providers can update and deploy improvements to their offering without needing their thousands of clients to upgrade.
Overall, the biggest change that cloud computing has brought to applications simply comes down to delivery.
Cloud is essentially a centralised method of consolidating compute and storage resources onto powerful, scalable hardware for the benefit of many users. By delivering applications ‘as a service’ from the cloud, end users have the ability to quickly leverage new software at low cost. Something that was essentially unheard of until recently.
The future of business is in cloud-deployed applications and those businesses embracing these services stand to gain a distinct advantage over their competitors. In the words of Rupert Murdoch, today’s business world “isn’t about the large beating the small, but the fast beating the slow.”
Tiernan O'Connor
