Move to the Cloud Fuels Business Growth
With scores of businesses looking to the future as the country begins to pull out of one of the worst recessions in recent history, many are making changes to move more of their IT structure to the latest technological innovation, the cloud. This move is having a lasting impact on many areas of business as traditional IT jobs are changing to include new skills and specialties.
With an ability to look again towards the future, business are finding that IT desktop support staff can be reduced as it moves to the clouds but additional training for employees working with new software systems will be needed. As business moves into the cloud a shift from physical resources such as IT and capital expenses to efficiency and utility will begin to effect business practices across the board.
Discovering just how cost efficient outsourcing their IT structure is, one of the first areas of business many companies are moving to the cloud is their disaster recovery services. “For the past two years companies have had to put a hold on disaster recovery. Now with the economy improving IT Departments are once again able to invest in disaster recovery,” said Mike Klein, President and COO of Michigan’s Online Tech.
Another sign of how quickly the business world is moving to the cloud can be seen in the entertainment business, where Amazon, Google and Apple have all made big leaps into providing various entertainment platforms to their consumers through the cloud. Google alone has spent over $8 billion on infrastructure and will continue to spend more.
A good example of the local impact of this is Indianapolis, where the focus the last few years has been to move workers out of the traditional workplace and into the information technology sector. The Indianapolis Business Journal recently wrote about the scarcity of quality tech workers in the area because of the growing cloud computing sector. The call for IT workers in the cloud computing industry was outstripping the ability of the area to provide them, causing the local universities to increase their number of course offering training in the tech industry.
A sure sign of the growth of cloud replacing traditional IT is the recent activity in the enterprise side of business. The latest acquisitions of several cloud providers such as TimeWarner’s purchase of NaviSite and Verizon’s takeover of Terramark combined with the latest news of CenturyLink’s $2.5 billion bid for Savvis point to a new direction for enterprise to move to the cloud in a big way.
As more and more businesses look to the cloud for future growth and control of costs, those that choose to not embrace this change may find themselves with serious economic and business disadvantages.
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