By Mark Atterby – Senior Staff Writer
As well the benefits of cost, scalability and flexibility, Cloud computing is giving organisations the ability to acquire IT automation to apply to a specific task or function without implementing a complex and costly system upgrade (regardless if it’s hosted or on-premise) nor necessarily engage in an extensive outsourcing project
Terms such as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and BPaaS (Business Process as a Service) have emerged as the cloud evolution rolled over the business world and changed the way IT resources are managed. Phil Gamble, from Expenses On Demand, comments, “Offering greater flexibility, the dynamic capacity for managing applications and greater scalability, the cloud has redefined the relationship between organisations and those who provide IT services”.
Generally, as a business or an organisation grows and evolves, new processes will emerge and existing ones will change and become more important. The existing systems in place no longer fully automate the processes that are important to the organisation or have become too complex to manage without significant manual intervention.
At this stage the organisation will be assessing its options. Can they upgrade their existing systems or should they look at installing a new system (i.e. should they upgrade from MYOB to a full blown hosted or on-premise ERP system) or do they outsource the processes or functions that have become too cumbersome to an outsource organisation?
As well as the costs and disruption associated with implementing a new ERP system, the organisation may need to invest in new hardware and servers as well as operating systems to run the new software if they want to have it on-premise.
With the plethora of specialist cloud providers that have emerged over the last few years, it is now possible for organisations to download the functionality they need at the fraction of the cost to upgrading their existing systems and IT infrastructure. For example, when TNT needed to automate the tasks and activities associated with managing employee expenses rather than upgrade or extend their existing SAP system they downloaded the relevant functionality from Expenses On Demand and were up and running within two weeks.
According to Art Papas, Founder and CEO of Bullhorn a leading cloud based candidate management system (www.bullhorn.com) the Cloud has been a game-changer in the recruitment industry. “Internal IT is rarely a recruitment agency core competency, yet Cloud computing puts the same, powerful recruitment software that runs the very biggest firms in to the hands of dynamic start-ups. And, thanks to web services APIs, different cloud vendors’ software can increasingly work together to provide recruiters with a seamless workflow across the entire placement process.”
It means common business functions and tasks can be managed by IT resources that are almost as easy to access as a smart phone application. According to a survey from Equinix , however a range of concerns or issues are emerging based around latency, internet congestion, and performance predictability. These new breed of internet applications rely on data being pushed to web and mobile devices, there by placing greater and more complex need on network infrastructure.
Modern rich internet applications not only generate far more network demand (AJAX, Rich Media), but are also more susceptible to unpredictable performance. As rich internet applications generally offer richer, more frequent interaction with the user, then the more noticeable to a user are changes in application performance. The other issue arises if an organisation is utilising a range of different providers: how they manage these different relationships, and how they integrate these services into their core applications.
