How The Cloud Gives Businesses a Competitive Edge

More studies are now showing that more businesses are seeking to take advantage of cloud computing in an effort to gain a competitive edge. According to a recent IBM survey of 3,000 global chief information officers (CIOs,) “60 per cent said they planned to use cloud services in the next five years to gain a competitive advantage.” The figure is nearly double from that of the previous year’s IBM survey.
 
Top Enterprise Priorities
The results of the IBM survey indicated that business intelligence and analytics are the leading priorities for businesses seeking to acquire cloud computing with “8 in 10 CIOs” citing these two priorities as of fundamental importance to their business operations.
Jeanette Horan, vice president and CIO at IBM, stated. “The winners will be those companies that understand the power of technologies like cloud, analytics, and mobility, and can harness that power to transform their business”
More Multinational Corporations Looking to the Cloud
According to a recent report from Ovum for Cable & Wireless,“ Multinationals have also been looking at the cloud, with deployment soaring” Their study found that the rate of cloud adoption by multinational corporations increased to “61 per cent from April 2010, with 45 per cent using cloud for at least some of their key IT services.”
Findings of the report revealed that multinational companies are in the early stages of adopting cloud services but more of these companies are planning to increase their adoption of cloud services. As well, when more companies have resolved concerns with the security of the cloud, they will start adopting more cloud services.
 
Backup and Data Storage
Although recent survey results from VMware indicated that small and medium size businesses are lagging behind in the adoption of the cloud, multinational corporations are choosing the cloud due to its efficient data storage and backup capabilities. Over half of those surveyed reported the benefits of both data storage and backup technologies as important when adopting the cloud. Advantages of a Cloud Backup Service include: data backup can be automated, a secured way of backing up data on a remote data storage, built-in disaster recovery facility, no hardware infrastructure to maintain, accessible from anywhere and at anytime, highly scalable as there is no cap on storage limit, and it is cheap with pay as you go model.
Cloud Computing Offers Businesses more Freedom
With cloud computing, businesses can focus on enhancing the business benefit of using IT for their enterprises instead of the technical aspects. Cloud computing frees companies to deliver IT services like never before. Cloud enables the high availability of IT infrastructure and applications regardless of location. More rapid service delivery also businesses to direct the tasks to create, configure, provision and add computing power in support of IT and business.