Cloud Computing Is Becoming More Popular Than Ever Before

Cloud computing reduces costs which helps provide businesses save on yearly expenses. A benefit of Cloud Computing is the Scalability factor, companies can start with one server reduce services to the bare minimum needed by the business. Then as the demand rises, they can then increase their cloud utilization to meet their new needs. “In addition, cloud computing is scalable. Traditional servers require expensive upgrades that cost a lot upfront. If your business doesn’t expand as much as you had hoped, that’s money you’ve wasted. Cloud service providers usually let you scale up and down seamlessly.” (Ismail, N, 2017)

Since the 2000s, cloud computing has become the most phenomenal IT service in the IT industry. It changed the whole IT industry upside down. Cloud computing is becoming the most popular and key service that is offered by many IT service providers including, Amazon, Google, Salesorce.com. (Leong, 2014) These companies top specialists in cloud computing. In addition to cloud computing,, leading traditional ERP service providers, such as IBM, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and Net Suite (Li, 2014) also provide their ERP software as Software as a Service.

Cloud computing, even though some of the concepts were around for since as far back as the 1950’s, is considered the latest digital revolution. Cloud computing is a very controversial subject and term because of its old roots however, cloud computing is the evolution of these technologies and paradigms. Cloud is an alignment of procedures, hardware, and software to create a redundant, flexible, and cost-efficient solutions for developers, consumers, and businesses. The cloud allows us to access store and access data from anywhere in the world. The Cloud can scale to theoretically unlimited computing resources such as Central Processing Unit (CPU) power, Persistent Hard Disk Drive (HDD) storage, and Random Access Memory (RAM) to run more robust applications. The unparalleled possibility in scalability of the cloud rids us of the limitations and the growing pains traditionally had when scaling physical devices and at fraction of the cost. This paradigm also allows for companies to focus on what they do best verses needing to investing in, spending time on building the technology to complete their company’s vision.

Flexibility has been one of the major reasons why people have moved to cloud computing. Because of the vast capacity of the service’s remote servers, cloud computing helps to meet business demands quickly and makes implementation easy.

Cloud computing is becoming the most popular topic in the realm of Information technology. Its popularity stems from the ability to allow with limited knowledge, to be able to access their information anytime and anywhere while reducing overhead and costs. Additionally, reduces the need for backups; this is because backups are done automatically, between different servers in the “cloud”. Even with the obscurity, cloud computing is really just a way to outsource computing resources, and have a third party maintain and upgrade them. Allowing companies to avoid the upfront investment in hardware and labor. Even though cloud computing may seem like a silver bullet to a company, cloud computing presents a whole new set of very serious risks

As indicated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Cloud computing is a model for empowering convenient, on-demand network access to a mutual pool of configurable computing resources, for example, networks, servers, storage, applications, and services that can be quickly provisioned and discharged with insignificant administration effort or service provider interaction [1]. In 1966, D. F. Parkhil predicted in his book “The challenge of the Computing Utility” that computing power would one day be available to the public in a similar way as water and electricity. Today, as indicated by the industry, Cloud computing is perceived as the fifth public resource or utility that follows after the commonly known public utilities, namely: water, electricity, gas, and telephony [2]. Many firms, both big and small have often preferred to shift the concerns of upgrades, maintenance and configuration of software back to its developers without the need for a constant on-site consultant presence. Today, with the inception of the Cloud computing paradigm, many firms have found relative answers to their quest for cost efficient computing. Firms can now have common access to the Cloud’s configurable computing resources across the Internet independently without reference to the seemingly hidden hosting infrastructure. This infrastructure comprise data centers that are maintained and monitored by resource providers all the time. Think of accessing a software by just a

Cloud computing has taken the reigns over our information technology world. Less and less companies and individuals are relying on local software, platform and infrastructure for their computing needs. Instead companies who offer web based cloud-computing services can supply the essential IT needs of any organization without the company having to deal with physical hardware. The cloud is defined as "Cloud computing is on-demand access to virtualized IT resources that are housed outside of your own data center, shared by others, simple to use, paid for via subscription, and accessed over the Web."(3) In order to answer the question of whether cloud computing is truly a general-purpose utility suitable for all one must

Among the most astounding features of cloud computing are that it may offer huge amounts of power with regards to computing and storage and still offer unequalled scalability and elasticity. Furthermore, when considering efficiencies and economies of scale, cloud computing services are not only cheaper, but they also provide a greener way of building and deploying IT services. However, Wang & Laszewski (2008) contend that cloud computing is distinct from other services in several ways.

Because the cloud service providers have economies of scales by providing services to many clients, the cost that is realized from using these service providers can’t be beaten in terms of expertise and costs. Now, smaller entities can concentrate on their core competences instead of worrying about the infrastructures surrounding it.

As cloud computing is in its growth stage there are plenty of issues to be resolved before leaping to cloud computing.

Cloud Computing is an evolving aspect in business application. One reason for business to embrace the coming era of cloud computing is that it allows companies to avoid infrastructure costs. Another reason for the cloud computing achieving this popularity seen so far is that enterprises can run their web-based applications faster than previously, together with higher manageability and less maintenance. Thus, enterprises can focus on their core business function and improve productivity in the meantime.

Cloud computing is :  Environment friendly  Task oriented  Requires no Maintenance It gives user the benefit of separating application code from physical resources and to use external assets to handle peak loads.

The use of cloud technology has become increasingly mainstream as individuals and businesses adapt to an environment in which having access to information and services 24/7, on a computer, phone or tablet is normal the new norm. Convenience, efficiency and data protection

Cloud computing enables companies to consume compute resources as a utility -- just like electricity -- rather than having to build and maintain computing infrastructures in-house.

Now that our company may be categorized as a small to medium sized firm, I believe we should consider the prospects of moving towards cloud computing. Traditional business applications have always been expensive and complicated. There is a daunting amount of hardware and software that needs to be dealt with, and more than likely, a team of experts is required to install, configure, test, run, secure and update them. (What is cloud computing?, 2016) Recently, cloud computing is a trend that is being observed in all kinds of businesses. This could be especially beneficial to a firm of our size.