Cloud computing - Decoded

 Cloud computing - Decoded

 Cloud computing is delivery of comprehensive digital capabilities through internet to organizations.

With cloud computing, organizations buy a range of services offered by Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). The CSP’s servers host all the client’s applications. Organizations can enhance their computing power more quickly and cheaply via the cloud than by purchasing, installing, and maintaining their own servers.

Time to market accelerates, speeding innovation to deliver better products and services across the world.

Cloud can help make small local companies become multinational. A company’s benefits from implementing the cloud are not constrained by its size. With cloud, highly skilled small companies can take on established competitors.

Digital transformation

Digital transformation can no longer be delayed—and can happen much more quickly than previously imagined. Nothing is more critical to a corporate digital transformation than becoming a cloud-first business. The benefits are faster time to market, simplified innovation and scalability, and reduced risk when effectively managed.

The cloud lets companies provide customers with novel digital experiences—in days, not months—and delivers analytics absent on legacy platforms

Cloud computing examples

Restaurant

A fast-casual restaurant chain’s online orders multiplied exponentially during the 2020 pandemic lockdowns, climbing to 400,000 a day, from 50,000. One pleasant surprise? The company’s online-ordering system could handle the volume—because it had already migrated to the cloud.

Banks

Banks use the cloud for several aspects of customer-service management. They automate transaction calls using voice recognition algorithms and cognitive agents (AI-based online self-service assistants directing customers to helpful information or to a human representative when necessary). In fraud and debt analytics, cloud solutions enhance the predictive power of traditional early-warning systems.

Automakers

An auto company uses a common cloud platform that serves 124 plants, 500 warehouses, and 1,500 suppliers to consolidate real-time data from machines and systems and to track logistics and offer insights on shop floor processes. Use of the cloud could save 30% off factory costs by 2025—and spark innovation at the same time.

Cloud costing

Cost savings are commonly seen as the primary reason for moving to the cloud.

Some cloud services, such as server space, are leased. Leasing requires much less capital up front than buying, offers greater flexibility to switch and expand the use of services, cuts the basic cost of buying hardware and software upfront, and reduces the difficulties of upkeep and ownership.

Managing costs is a different and more dynamic approach focused on OpEx rather than CapEx.

Cloud talent

The talent demands of the cloud include

• Full-stack developers
• Data engineers
• Cloud-security engineers
• Identity- and access-management specialists
• Cloud engineers

 Use of cloud – Industry closeup

High-tech, retail, and healthcare organizations occupy the top end of the value capture continuum. Electronics and semiconductors, consumer-packaged-goods, and media companies make up the middle. Materials, chemicals, and infrastructure organizations cluster at the lower end.