What business benefits do cloud computing services provide? What problems do they solve?
- Cloud computing is a system in which software programs and applications are accessed and used virtually by the companies through an Internet connection. The benefits of using cloud computing service include:
- Can store large amounts of data and information, it helps the company a lot to store the important data and information.
- It helps us build a large database and do not need large space
- Can help us to quickly find the desired information from the stored data and information
- Cloud computing service improves the work efficiency and helps to solve the problems faced by the companies, for instances:
- Amazon has used the Web services division (AWS), which helps to get a large amount of computing resources (separate, allocate and arrange computing resources). Cloud computing helps Amazon to save costs and increase profits even spend more time on other work which had more values.
- It helps to improve the response time for the customer. InterContinental company lets their customers receive data faster if the data is located on a server that is physically close to them.
What are the disadvantages of cloud computing?
- Possible downtime without internet connection
- Cloud computing is a system that is totally dependent on internet connection. When the internet connection or network is down or not available, cloud services are down as well. If your internet service suffers from frequent outages or slow speeds cloud computing may not be suitable for your business. Even if cloud computing providers take to prevent the internet downtime issue, the risk will still always remain and hard to avoid.
- Technical Issues
- You should be aware of the fact that this technology is always prone to outages and other technical issues. Even the best cloud service providers run into this kind of trouble, in spite of keeping up high standards of maintenance. Besides, as mentioned, you will need a very good Internet connection to be logged onto the server at all times then only you can access to the stored data and information online.
- Security in the Cloud
- Although security in the cloud is generally good and reliable, established cloud computing vendors ensure they have the latest, most sophisticated data security systems as data security is always a big concern for businesses. It will make your company vulnerable to external hack attacks and threats when you store information in the cloud especially the P&C information. As the servers are interconnected in the cloud, a hacker can breach one system and then make way into other linked systems.
- Lack of support
- Cloud-based services always do not have the best customer care support system. It may be difficult to get them on the phone or by e-mail, and they often do not provide illustrated user manuals. Instead, normally they will ask the customers to rely on FAQ pages and online community support which may be always hard to understand.
How do the concepts of capacity planning, scalability, and TCO apply to this case? Apply these concepts both to Amazon and to subscribers of its services.
- Capacity planning is the process of determining the production capacity needed by an organization to meet the changing demands for its products. In another word, capacity planning is the process of predicting when a computer hardware system becomes saturated to ensure that adequate computing resources are available for work of different priorities and the organization has enough computing power for its current and future needs. By referring to the case of Amazon, they must plan its future needs to be capable of providing sufficient computing power for both AWS and Amazon retail services, they need to know that a lack of which will result the rejection by subscribers to use their services in the future.
- Scalability is defined as the ability of a computer, product, or system to expand to serve a large number of users and handle a growing number of works without breaking down and having downtime issue. Scalability relates to both Amazon and AWS subscribers. Amazon must be able to provide its customers with services that are scalable, as it claims to do on its website: “Take advantage of our massive compute capacity and storage to build whatever kinds of applications your business demands, no matter how fast it grows or how big it gets”.
- Total Cost Ownership (TCO) is a financial estimate intended to help buyer and owners determine the direct and indirect cost of a product or system. Amazon must provide hardware capacity planning and scalability. With the development of information technology, Amazon will have more and more customers. Both Amazon and Amazon's customer requires a large database to store a variety of data and information and this help the company to grow. Amazon must bear the total TCO of its services, while Amazon is also needed to maintain the profitability of the company. However, the services' subscribers benefit from not having to worry about these issues.
What kinds of businesses are most likely to benefit from using cloud computing? Why?
- Nowadays, cloud computing has begun to seize the business world. Zynga is a good example of a company using cloud computing to improve its business in a new way.
- More cost-effective
- The game might be a mild success, or smash hit that adds millions of new users. Rather the Zynga spending on computing resources of its own before the launch of the game, it’s more cost-effective to use Amazon’s cloud services.
- Data lost prevention
- Lose of data in an information economy can be one of the most devastating things that can happen for a business. A company that previously had a great reputation could quickly lose its popularity if it loses a significant portion of its data. For example, Zynga’s move on the game onto its private zCloud, which is structurally similar to Amazon’s cloud, but operates under Zynga’s control in data centers on the East and West coast.
- Collaborative businesses
- Many other companies share Zynga’s concern about cloud reliability and security and this remains a major barrier to widespread cloud adoption. In order for large scale projects to be completed, it is often necessary for people who are geographically separated from one another to collaborate. Applications running on cloud based software make this process very convenient and people can connect to each other even when they are at different locations.
- Application
- It is becoming more common for business to choose the “software as a service” model rather than in the house model. Zynga is the developer of wildly popular Facebook applications such as FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and many others. While common business sense might suggest that is makes more sense to pay for a product once and move on, rather than paying monthly fee, this is not necessarily the case with software, especially in rapidly changing fields such as customer relationship management.
