Why do we see the future in the Cloud?

Why move to the Cloud?
It really the future. Reliable. Scalable. Adapatable. Cost-saving. Secure. Forward-looking.

Who’s adopting?

The Cloud is persuading more forward-thinking business leaders every day to adopt its best practices such as automation, resource sharing, scalability, agility. IT departments are freed to focus on innovation rather than running systems, reducing costs and automating the management of complex technology.

Definition of the Cloud

In its simplest form, cloud computing consists of shared virtual computing resources accessed as a service. It doesn’t matter where the computers themselves are based, inside an organisation or externally; the actual Cloud computing resources, ie the software platforms, are offered on an as-needed basis, and delivered over the internet. No need to purchase discs that go out of date or need constant upgrading, with all the staff downtime that involves; and in our own lives we’re already used to accessing sharing storage sites such as flickr and youtube; Cloud computing is one step on, offering the actual software to be used in-house on a licensed basis.

Advantages

Scalability. The applications and usabilily grow with the organisation’s requirements.
Agility.
Reliability, the systems we offer come with uptime guarantees of at least 99.5%. Or your money back.
Service-orientated.
Utility-based. Users only pay for the services they use.
Shared. Multiple users share a common infrastructure, allowing costs to be more effectively managed without sacrificing security of data.
SLA-driven. Clouds are managed dynamically based on service-level agreements.

Related technology

Although the term ‘cloud computing’ is relatively new, the behind it is well-tried – incuding grid computing (slightly complex data sharing), virtualisation, utility computing, hosting (less adaptable than Cloud) and software as a service (SaaS) – which itself is an application as a service, based on Cloud’s IT infrastructure.

Why should you move to the Cloud?

Cloud computing provides businesses with the agility required to move quickly in highly competitive business environments, dynamically update elements of an organisation, and move workloads to improve efficiency without having to worry about constantly taking on new applications.
Most importantly, the cost savings are enormous – sharing an infrastructure, increased efficiency and reduced software costs offer immediate savings.

Security issues – the facts

There are many public cloud platforms already part of everyday life. However, security and compliance are among the factors driving the adoption of private clouds, along with reliability – an overload of usage on a public cloud can cause total failure for some hours.
In contrast, private cloud computing exists within an organisation, typically for its exclusive usage. They can deliver many of the benefits of public cloud computing, without the downside and solve the issues of security and reliability by keeping data safely behind an organisation’s firewall. However building truly robust applications that make it easy to take advantage of the cloud’s characteristics is a difficult, time-consuming task that can severely tax an organisation’s resources.

So why move to NetSuite or Salesnet?

Organisations turn to NetSuite as a ready-built Cloud-based application that has already done all the hard work, offering guaranteed reliability alongside security and agility, reducing both capital and operational costs and automating the management of complex technologies.

Future of the Cloud

We believe that one day, all business will run on the Cloud or other shared platforms, for the reasons outlined above. No more piles of servers, discs and manuals getting dusty, but instead forward-looking adaptable scalable platforms with the training and support to back them up. Commentators the world over are looking at 2011 as the year Cloud really takes off in business. Early adopters will see the benefits – but the 10,000+ businesses already running on NetSuite have known that for some time.