The presence of cloud computing in business is getting a reaction almost as though it’s something new. There’s a lot of attention being paid to advances mostly as a result of affordable, scalable SaaS solutions. These solutions allow for a mobility and ease of access older systems didn’t allow. Given they’re a symptom of the newer cloud computing push, they’re of course serving to earn accolade for the cloud that it once did not have.
Of course, cloud computing in business went unnoticed for what it was so long due to the fact it wasn’t referred to as such. As a result, people do not make the connection between now and the past to realize in retrospect it’s always been around.
Cloud is a new buzzword that in many circles has lost all meaning, but there is a true definition for the concept. But let me be frank, it’s basically a fancy catchy term for stuff being handled on a server and delivered through TCP/IP. Yeah, it’s just “stuff that goes over the internet, usually with a browser”.
Server farms are what these were once called, and businesses have used these for years. Originally, they weren’t offsite, but once bandwidth and security allowed it, data centers began leasing servers to businesses to serve as rental super computing power. Oil companies, engineering companies and large enterprises with a lot of variables to calculate in business strategy have used these since the early 90s in fact.
But, what’s changed? Why does it have a new name, and why is it so popular? Well, because of the omnipresence of the digital world in our lives, everyone has something constructive they could do with supercomputing power, networking and storage.
Modern convenience makes this affordable concept a reality, and in many cases, it’s almost free. But, we’re talking about cloud computing in business, and what’s been done to advance it specifically.
Well, as said before, SaaS does allow for mobility and negation of distance, so that a business with travelling employees is not out of commission due to distance or being en route most of the time. Beyond this, though, there’s a standardization to be had from the cloud that was once not possible.
Cloud computing and SaaS give businesses a set of interoperable tools to track many assets of their business, and allows businesses to grow independent of their location or distance between offices. This kind of solidarity allowed by BI, ERP, CRM and training services makes business a much more reliable and controlled environment than the chaos that preceded it.
On top of this, leasable supercomputer resources like this give even small businesses the raw computing power they need to calculate trends and run deep analysis to find problems and remedy them. Thanks to these advances in SaaS, this supercomputing power is represented in the same fashion their old traditional software was, but with the insurmountable power of a server farm behind it.
In the past 10 years, we’ve seen cloud computing in business evolve from a dedicated remote super computer terminal into a publically-accepted scenario of business software being part of the internet. Quite a transition, but probably one for the best.