What is the Power of Cloud? (to the Business) By Dave Berry

Of course many readers, technologists and businesses are acutely aware of the value prop of the cloud but what about the rest of the "majority" of people who don’t? If you do a search on this topic, you will mostly get links to marketing materials that are fairly high level and full of the usual buzzwords with more links to lengthy case studies. As a business technology enabler, there needs to be a simpler message or elevator pitch that is easy to understand yet convincing. Ah, the simplicity or less is more approach rears it’s beautiful head once again. Below are some recipes to draw from for an elevator ride of any duration.

The Enterprise Cloud Reduces Business Outages Increasing Customer Satisfaction

Put simply and avoiding technical acronyms, can the business rely on 99.99+% availability from the cloud? Look no further than Netflix as an example because yes the cloud is certainly up to the task.

Immediate Availability Gives You a Your Competitive Edge (for now)

Back in the day, Dell drove industry change by assembling computers on demand reducing inventories and wrecking havoc on computer storefronts. Well the cloud equivalent is to be able to go to the cloud store, answer a few questions, enter your credit info and within 1 hour or less you are up and running.

A Right Sized Business Reduces Time, Headaches and Cost

You may wonder what this is? It takes many forms but to me you have to ask does the business get what it paid for? No more shelf ware and complicated upgrade processes. You need more capacity for certain business cycles, zoom it’s there. You need more storage, of course that is automated. You think Apple and other retailers have to turn on any switches to increase capacity? Maybe they do now but they shouldn’t.

Business Friendly User Interfaces Decreases Time to Market

Your thinking mobile and that is certainly true but it is much more than that. This is the type of disruptive technology that could put technologists like me out of work. Non-technical end users must be able to build and deploy apps that previously required a CS degree and many years of experience. Consider how Smart Data cloud initiatives are disrupting Big Data. Nate Silver, beware.

Build a Nimble Business by Thinking Small

The cloud is all about modularity, extensibility and continuous release cycles. A/B testing drives micro feature planning rendering the traditional roadmap virtually useless. In a fully optimized environment, features will show up before you even have a chance to request them. Social tools will drive this change more than traditional communication channels and you have to be on top of it because your competition sure is. Read the complete article here.

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