There are untapped business opportunities around us every day. As long as our world is not perfect, there are business opportunities.
While a lack of creativity is one reason why many business opportunities go unfilled, another is lack of agility. The need may exist and be obvious to a business, but attempting to service the need might not make sense or be able to happen fast enough.
Cloud services change the game, however, because they introduce a level of business agility that has never existed before. Smart businesses can now capitalize on opportunities almost as fast as they see them, and test these opportunities with little capital investment. The word for this process is “iteration” in IT circles, and one of the reasons that so many people are getting rich in the IT world is because they know better than most that iterating makes good business sense.
Cloud services can help businesses capitalize on opportunities because there’s less need to invest in infrastructure to try out a new service.
“Cloud computing provides business agility because the ability to provision and scale a system is built into the architecture of most public clouds,” noted technologist David Linthicum in a blog post. “Thus, if there is a business need for a new system, it’s just a matter of provisioning the resources required from public cloud providers.”
This process is much quicker and easier than a business purchasing, configuring and hosting its own hardware and software assets.
With the cloud, a company can build applications using core Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service without having waves of procurement. It can change applications be allowing them to scale up to the needs of the business, and scale down just as easily.
Not all businesses have as much need for such flexibility, of course.
Verticals such as healthcare and finance get a great deal of value from agile platforms. Those that have relatively static business processes, such as many in manufacturing, will probably not realize as much value.
Two questions to ask when calculating the value of the cloud on a business are the value of change for a business and the amount of change in the industry.
In terms of the value of change, can the business quickly change its core IT systems to take advantage of new markets or perhaps adjust quickly around regulatory changes?
In terms of the amount of change, how often is business likely to change over a period of time? The more change that is inherent to the business, the more value the cloud can play.
But even with relatively static businesses, the cloud is becoming necessary. That’s because meeting needs is where the money is at, so even industries that have relatively static business processes are evolving to drive greater value through faster iteration of services.
Iteration is becoming a competitive necessity, and the cloud makes it possible.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey