Cloud Computing: Economies of Scale and Innovation in Tourism
The adoption of cloud computing in the tourism industry can guarantee economies of scale and innovation.
Tourism Ireland believes in these possibilities. It has moved its entire IT infrastructure to the cloud on a whopping five-year contract worth 850,000 Euros.
Tourism Ireland stands to gain a lot from this development, as the company manages over a dozen websites in over 20 countries. These sites provide tourist information for countless visitors to Ireland. As information handled increases, Tourism Ireland seeks to reduce cost by moving its erstwhile in-house IT structure to a privately-managed cloud. Subsequently, the company has, by far, succeeded in cutting its hosting and energy cost by fifty percent.
This strategic move guarantees both economies of scale and greater innovation for the company. Hosting its IT infrastructure in the cloud affords Tourism Ireland the unique opportunity of concentrating only on the internal activity of management and business expansion. Niall Powderly, head of IT Infrastructure of the cloud company hosting Tourism Ireland’s IT system, declared that: “For enterprise organizations like Tourism Ireland, the (new) infrastructure offers levels of efficiency and opportunities to innovate that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.” Therefore, Tourism Ireland operates optimally through the centralization of its IT systems that have no negative impact on the company’s internal and external activities.
Tourism Ireland achieves efficiency by creating a common resource pool via a combination of network, servers, storage facility and customer-centered services, all hosted in the cloud. This action definitely helps the company save on the cost of maintaining IT personnel and other contracted consultants.
Niall Powderly advised: “Organizations that were reluctant to move IT off-premise are now looking at it because …networks are faster and more affordable. You can now move infrastructure to a data center at a very reasonable price and have no performance impact.”
Three significant merits of adopting cloud computing in tourism industry stand out from Niall’s statements above:
- Speed: Tourism business requires the use of many interconnected computers that are needed to pass important travel information to potential customers. Fast internet connection and computing operations are constantly required to guarantee optimal performance.
- Affordability: Cloud computing is affordable and helps cut back on recurrent expenses, especially in the area of maintaining in-house IT structure, constantly buying the latest software, hardware and the payment of wages to IT personnel.
- No Performance Impact: There are no observable impacts on the IT performance during and after moving a company’s IT system to the cloud. In other words, the quality of services rendered by the company after its adoption of cloud computing would not be affected, even in the short term.
Tourism Ireland’s action will motivate other tourism companies to sign up for cloud computing. Cloud computing will help companies in the tourism industry devise appropriate methods for managing their customers’ data, operational processes and business expansion in a way that cost efficiency and optimum performance can be guaranteed. The trend is likely to continue as many firms discover the potential gains of cloud computing strategies and technology.
Companies in this type of industry requires a heavy duty cloud provider that can accommodate the unexpected increase of resource demand; one that provides the highest possible resiliency of data flow and a reliable network – much like what GMO Cloud offers. Read more about this feature on the Network page.
Be Part of Our Cloud Conversation
Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.
About the Guest Writer:
Jerry Olasakinju, a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) degree holder, is a passionate researcher and writer whose interest in everything computing is unparalleled. He blogs about his literary works at http://jerryolasakinju.blogspot.jp/
