How does cloud computing services help to cut down costs in high-level business? Saving Changes...
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Bernard GorePortfolio, Programme & Project Professional| NZ PoliceWellington, New Zealand
First thing to say is that it doesn't, or at least it shouldn't be assumed that it will. In a large business that already has economy of scale, and runs its infrastructure efficiently, moving this to the cloud may give little or no benefit, or even cost more.
The benefit in terms of cost is mainly around the economy of scale - a cloud provider with massive resources pays less per unit for storage, for processing, etc, but for a big efficient organisation the unit cost reduction is tiny in the cloud, plus in the cloud they have to pay the cloud providers to provide the service.
The big benefits of cloud are often those of flexibility - if you have your own infrastructure you have to own it, and if you want more tomorrow it may take weeks to deliver and provision, and if you find you don't want some item you struggle to dispose of it, whereas in the cloud you can often just turn it off and stop paying. This is especially important during development and test when you may want several identical environments, but at the end of that phase you no longer need hem, at least not fully active - Cloud lets you "dial down" those until you need them again, and lose most of the cost. Saving Changes...
Anonymous
A lot has happened since this original question and Bernard's answer.
It does, across the board. Things that are brought up are network latency and security. There is usually a mix of solutions to offset this.
The ultimate benefit is still economy of scale. It doesn't matter how big of a company you are, you can't compete with the Amazon's and Google's of the world. They just run the cost into the ground. The increased competition for services has also run prices artificially low. Saving Changes...
