Cloud computing - Assignment Example

CLOUD COMPUTING Cloud Computing Affiliation Part1 In the past few years, cloud computing has become a very attractive technologyfor the majority of business organizations because “it facilitates the outsourcing of enterprise software applications and computing capabilities to intermediary services with the purpose of decreasing costs associated with applications, hardware, licenses, personnel, real estate, maintenance, power and other expenditures.” In view of the fact that cloud computing is based on the idea of “doing more with less” value proposition with higher return on investment hence it plays a critical role during the economic recession (KAMOUN, 2013).

Without a doubt, the worldwide economic downturn forced the business organizations to reevaluate their business strategies and models from start till end. In this scenario, the business organizations spent a lot of time and resources in assessing their IT infrastructures and they considered cloud computing as a conceivable substitute to the traditional IT infrastructures. One of the most important advantages of cloud computing is that it allows the business organizations to convert fixed price mode (such as cost of ownership, servers, employee salaries , servers and additional expenses) to flexible price mode.

On the other hand, with traditional IT models the organizations had to pay heavy charges all the time, whether they make extensive use of information technology or not. In fact, they had to pay higher prices for the time when IT was not used such as holidays. So there was always a fixed cost associated with traditional IT models. On the other hand, cloud computing is both scalable and flex­ible. In addition, it allows business organizations to buy only what they need, and pay for only those services which are used (Cooke, 2010).

Part 2At the present, the majority of business organizations are adopting cloud computing technology for the effective management of their business activities. In fact, the implementations of cloud computing can be seen in all the fields such as business, finance, education, defense and so on. I have chosen a case study where an Oil and Gas industry shifted its IT systems from an internal data center to Amazon EC2. The basic objective for the selection of cloud computing technology was to reduce IT costs up to 37%in the next five years, and eliminating more than 21% support calls regarding their IT system.

The company is basically a UK based firm that is currently operating in the Middle East. The results of this case study demonstrated that cloud computing can be an expressively inexpensive substitute to acquiring and retaining IT infrastructure inside the firm. In view of the fact that cloud computing brings a large number of benefits and opportunities at an affordable charge so the company intended to attain these benefits while reducing IT costs. The results of this case study show that the organizations successfully attained all its objectives associated with the transition.

However, they also faced certain disadvantages and risks such as low customer satisfaction as well as service quality because of the transfer of authority to another intermediary, initiating the company to long term budget unpredictability with respect to cloud-usage, reduced job satisfaction because of variations in an environment of work and data migration expenditures. The case study lacked other aspects as well, such as actual cost estimation associated with employees and quality (Khajeh-Hosseini, Greenwood, & Sommerville, 2010).

ReferencesCooke, J. (2010). The Shift to Cloud Computing: Forget the Technology, It’s About Economics. San Jose, CA: Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG).KAMOUN, F. (2013). RETHINKING THE ROLE OF ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE DURING TIMES OF ECONOMIC DOWNTURN: A DYNAMIC CAPABILITIES APPROACH. Journal of Information Technology Management, Volume 24 Issue 1, 26-48.Khajeh-Hosseini, A., Greenwood, D., & Sommerville, I. (2010). Cloud Migration: A Case Study of Migrating an Enterprise IT System to IaaS.

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