zaGarage | How social, mobile & cloud technologies can have positive impact on business & society.

And why do you need one to leverage the real benefits and flexibility?

For any organization planning to embrace cloud computing, it’s essential to understand economic benefits, risk profiles to build a good strategy that establishes business benefits, operational process rather than technology to manage the dynamic infrastructure needs while building your next generation IT systems.

Consider the following areas while developing your cloud strategy:

1. Business agility – How do you respond to the increasing needs of your business and support the future growth without re-engineering your online applications/products?. One of the significant benefits of cloud platforms is to provide flexibility by meeting the changing needs by quickly providing on-demand resources without a significant TCO (total cost of ownership) as in case of physical data centers. Understanding your business case and future strategy should be part of your plan to get the business agility benefits offered by cloud without significant risk by vendor lock-in or adhere to required business compliance.

• Cost efficiency – At the infrastructure level, the business problem is to cost-effectively provision infrastructure to run your business and auto scale without non-linear cost overhead based on the business needs. Cloud is a good choice for a given business scenario when it provides the most effective computing resources based on flexibility, reliability, security, and other factors important to that specific business case. The advantage of pay-as-you-go model reduces the upfront costs and allows you to free resources when no longer needed.

• High Availability – Your online applications/products/services needs to be available 24×7 for your customers and even minor failures result in loss of business. This requires planning your deployment architecture to support fail-safe and fail-over setup which can be easily managed and supported to ensure high availability to avoid any impact for your business customers or users.

• Business continuity and Disaster recovery – The traditional physical data center based model is very cost-intensive in terms of planning a stand-by and replicated setups for your application components and business data. A good cloud strategy helps you achieve this reliably and cost-effectively to manage data and applications that the business generates and consumes so you can monitor and easily recover from failures in cloud infrastructure.

• Focus on your core-competency not Infrastructure – IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) helps your business to free IT resources from provisioning infrastructure to focus on core business. The on-demand and auto scale model of procuring required computing resources helps your business to focus on growth.