Region Enterprises Expand Business Reach Through Cloud Innovation

But one size of cloud isn't necessarily the best fit for all. Each nation and locality has its own unique political and social context, which businesses must take into consideration as they implement new technologies and roll out new services. In this regard, an important operative element in developing economies such as India is that disruptive developments such as cloud are often better positioned for rapid uptake than they are in more mature markets where legacy technologies are dominant. This "leapfrogging" effect is similar to what happened with cell phone adoption patterns over the past two decades.

Cloud vs Primitive Telecommunications

Although the underlying technologies are equally complex, where cloud differs from the historical telecommunications comparison is that phones are mostly a utility where the customer is handed a device and simply uses it as is. With cloud, while a LOB manager might interact with a service solely as a user via a Web portal, there are numerous possibilities for customization as well as many decisions to be made before the manager even gets to the point of clicking through his or her browser.

Those choices, made typically with assistance from (or even ownership by) the IT department, tend to be strategic in nature. First, an organization must determine its requirements. Are its needs limited to elastic compute capacity, to support a growing business? Or is online storage also necessary? Should you run mission-critical software in the cloud, or instead use it to essentially outsource non-core IT?

‘Software as a Service’ for businesses

The cloud consumption model is also a significant consideration. Is the way to get up and running quickest-by accessing applications in the cloud via the Software as a Service (SaaS) model-the best fit for your business? Perhaps your organizational requirements point towards Platform as a Service (PaaS), which provides an elastically scalable platform for consolidation of new and existing applications. Or maybe the on-premise cloud model of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), where converged infrastructure from a vendor like Oracle, is deployed in your data center and paid for according to a monthly pricing model, is the best fit.

In choosing a cloud provider, local support is important. As well, national regulations, such as rules regarding the physical location of data, may impact consumption choices.

One size never fits all. A collaborative roadmap needs to be built so that organizations may choose from a variety of cloud services and deployment models. The right cloud solution must be aligned with business goals and benefits, encompassing an organization’s users and its technology.