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Top Five Cloud Business Benefits

While the most talked about benefit of cloud computing is typically around increased efficiency, there are other tangible cloud business results not as frequently discussed. Those advantages include increased agility, lowered capital expenses and fewer operational issues.

Edwin Schouten, cloud services leader for IBM Global Technology (News - Alert) Services, enumerated the five of the leading cloud business benefits in a recent article, which include:

Business agility: Cloud allows gives businesses access to compute resources as needed, which in turn shortens IT projects and provides a quicker and more predictive time-to-market. “Being able to deliver results faster, cheaper and with more quality might just give your business a competitive edge and make her more nimble on her feet,” Schouten said, citing the example of a data analytics project that was reduced from four months to just three weeks.

New business models: Cloud services have opened up a new world for business innovation initiatives, according to Schouten. “Utilizing or combining these services can result in new and innovative business models, generating new value propositions and resulting in new revenue streams,” Schouten explained, noting that he sees this last category especially in small and medium enterprises.

Fewer operational issues: Cloud allows businesses to deploy the same service or type of services repetitively, with the same result every time, helping them to “predicatively deploy pre-build server images, application services or entire application landscapes defined using design patterns,” Schouten added.

Better use of resources: Cloud also helps employees to spend time on other tasks and goals that bring a greater value to the business. This is harder to quantify in terms of dollars, but it allows organizations to get more “use” out of their biggest asset – their employees.

Lowered CAPEX: While not every one is convinced that shifting from a CAPEX model to an OPEX (News - Alert) model is always of benefit, overall the OPEX model is more beneficial because there are no long-term financial commitments.

As you can see, there are many benefits to cloud computing. While the efficiency advantages may be reason enough for organizations to move to a cloud-based model, the operational, financial and agility benefits help build the cloud business merits IT decision makers seek to realize within their companies.