Cloud Computing Offers Opportunities For Medium-Sized Companies

Cloud Computing: Software and services from the cloud are playing an increasingly important role for medium-sized companies. However, especially with smaller companies, there is still a lack of clarity about what this is all about. Many cloud services are made for medium-sized companies.

In theory, she could use her consulting firm’s FTP server, but it’s so awkward to use that she’d instead go to the cloud and use Dropbox. Dropbox is a mailbox on the Internet. A few gigabytes of storage space is easy enough for your files. Now all she needs to do is send the approval to the seminar participants, and the collaboration platform is ready because the authorized participants can also store files on the Dropbox server until closed again.

This example shows an application from the public cloud that is now enjoying increasing popularity with private users. However, hardly any of the users who post private photos here would come up with the idea of ​​saving a construction drawing or similar susceptible documents from their company in the publicly accessible Dropbox because their only protection is a password. And that is usually easy to crack.

“Cloud Computing Is Independent Of Company Size”

That is why, in the eyes of many IT managers, personal data and data relevant to patent law have no place in the public cloud. Instead, they are safely stored behind a company’s firewall or an IT service provider such as Fiduccia or Dates in the private cloud. However, the fictitious example. This shows that a kind of shadow IT can arise within a company if the CIO does not take precautions in good time. So the cloud is a governance and compliance issue. “Cloud computing is independent of the company’s size”.

More and more board members and managing directors see the advantages of outsourcing services to a cloud structure or obtaining them from there. A company can rent internet-based services from a technology partner on a subscription basis.

The Advantage: Instead of waiting for a period to write off this investment (capital expenditure or CAPEX), the CFO can claim these costs as ongoing operating expenses (operational expenditure or OPEX) for tax purposes in the current financial year.

Software Providers Are Putting More And More Applications For Cloud Computing Online

This small change has considerable consequences: companies invest less and less capital in license-dependent software because of CAPEX expenditure. Since the demand for OPEX-based delivery models – i.e. public, private or hybrid cloud – has multiplied, almost all software providers provide their programs and associated services in the cloud, i.e., data centers.

A medium-sized company that has standardized and consolidated its IT already has a private cloud through its virtualization, a resource pool characterized by flexibility but limited scalability. This pool can be provided as a service – in other words: the cloud. To obtain additional computing or storage capacity in the event of seasonal use, he can rent external services for his infrastructure and cancel them later. This “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS) is the basic building block of the service architecture of a cloud.

The next higher level is a “Platform as a Service” (PaaS). “A PaaS” “offers a development environment tailored to the cloud so that cloud services can be developed quickly and flexibly.” Also in-house. The top-level in the service offering is “Software as a Service” (SaaS), whereby software is used and accessed in the cloud.

Medium-Sized Companies Often Need Individual Cloud Solutions

Every medium-sized company has to find out which combination of services from these three layers represents the right service package for them. However, there is a catch: the core application of the medium-sized company is usually so individually adapted that it cannot be rented or rented as a service. The solution partner on site has to step in here. The cloud poses migration problems for them: They have to hire or retain competent staff to provide and maintain the cloud technology securely and with a high level of service. Such partners are helped through initiatives such as HP cells and IBM Smart Cloud.

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