Cloud Services Market

Cloud Computing - A transformational technology:

The Cloud Industry delivers cloud computing services and is defined as follows by ISO/IEC JTC 1 N9687 Report on Cloud Computing:

Cloud computing provides the IT infrastructure and environment to develop/host/run services and applications, on demand, with pay-as-you-go pricing, as a service. It also provides resource and services to store data and run applications, in devices, anytime, anywhere, as a service.

Since the invention of the mainframe in the mid 1900's, computing has had 5 major paradigm shifts which could be summarised by the diagram below.



Customer Benefits:

Cloud computing is widely expected to transform the way IT capacity and capability is delivered over the coming years due to its highly economical pay-as-you-consume business model. No longer is IT adoption the privilege of the wealthiest companies, but it is both affordable and more resilient than many services can be delivered internally.

The customer benefits of Cloud Services typically get grouped into 3 areas:

1.
  • New Financial Model
  • Pay only for what you use
  • Lower and predictable operating costs
  • Shift from capex investment to opex
  • Accelerate speed to financial
2.
  • Reduced IT Management
  • Faster deployment
  • Reliability and fault-tolerance
3.
  • Enhanced Service Levels
  • Internet collaboration
  • Anywhere access
  • Resilient infrastructure = less downtime
  • Instant self-provisioning

Cloud Service Application:

Cloud computing is particularly of benefit in areas that have to cope with peaks and troughs in demand, or have to scale quickly. The diagram below sets out 6 of the key IT operational environments where cloud computing can benefit the most:

Cloud computing embraces and covers the following market concepts:

Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS): The delivery of hardware replacement services in the cloud such as Storage, Processing and RAM enabling organisations to outsource servers and datacentres.

Platform as a Service (PAAS): The delivery of a computing platform and solution stack as a service

Software as a Service (SaaS): The provision of a specific software application on a hosted pay-per-use /user basis.

CIF Research Papers

Drawing information from 450 end user organisations across all verticals and scale, as well as 200 suppliers of IT solutions, CIF's research has been structured into a series of informative White Papers.

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