In this article, Injecting Innovation Into IT With The Cloud,
Gerardo points out that cloud technology can help IT in two major ways. First
is increased infrastructure efficiency and the other is improved skills effectiveness.
Infrastructure efficiency is increased through the use of
cloud applications. It saves the costs of cumbersome server procurement process
and setup. Skills effectiveness is improved by outsourcing some of the
infrastructure management to database administrator, a security specialist
where managed services provided a constant quality of service with SLA
guarantee. These freed up IT resources to work on the innovating new features that
bring a competitive advantage to the organization.
Payroll and HR administration also experience similar
changes, where processes, people and technology are changing from manual and local
processing to automate online processing. This freed up HR resources to focus
on strategic planning that value add to the organization. Thus, each department
in the organization has the potential to change from a cost center to a profit
center with the use of cloud technology.
In this article, Cloud: How IT Becomes Business Innovators,
it highlights cloud is transforming the business mode where business leaders
are able to maximize product capacity without increasing expenditure dramatically.
Especially when most SaaS vendors charged based on per headcount usage,
organizations have the flexibility to reduce/increase the usage as deemed
necessary. At the moment the real value of cloud to a company is the potential
capabilities to increase work productivity, and there may be hidden values that
we have yet to discover. It will be interesting to see how the cloud technology
will transform the global working landscape in coming years.
