Cloud Computing: A Business Revolution !

Cloud computing (CC) is an innovative component of information systems (IS) that enables businesses to operate, develop, and provide customer service online. It meets up with the requirement that companies host online apps on their own servers.

Public, private, hybrid, and community clouds are considerable platform types for cloud computing. Adding to this, Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) are well known as major service models for cloud computing (Madhavaiah et al., 2012)

A Business Says: What's in Cloud Computing for me?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxT233EdY5c

Source: (Youtube, 2021) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxT233EdY5c

Businesses may benefit greatly from cloud computing by saving cost, extending scalability and flexibility. Cloud computing implementation allot enterprises to approach data anywhere in high speed and integrated security. Cloud antivirus software monitors any insecurities and repair them instantly. Cloud services provide recovery and backup facility in case of disasters. Moreover, the unlimited storage capacity allows businesses to analyze big volume of data which assists in forming insights and making decisions (Sether, A., 2016).

(Amazon Web Services, 2021) has also mentioned in their video that companies can use a variety of technical services from cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services on demand instead of buying and operating servers. Regardless of enterprise nature and capacity, they can allot variety of use cases like data storage and recovery, software development, big data analysis, and web apps. Cloud computing enables companies to become nimbler, cut expenses, grow immediately, and deploy internationally in a matter of minutes.

Risks of using Cloud Computing and ways of mitigation

There are some risks for using cloud computing in business fields which mainly related to security concerns, data privacy, and provider lock-in. Business reputational and financial risks may occur due to data breaches. Inadequate Cloud Security Architecture or access governance may expose data, infrastructure and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to hackers and other external threats (Carroll et al., 2011).

Companies must not worry about using cloud computing because risks can be minimized, and that what (Azarnik et al., 2012) have discussed in their research by identifying risks of using cloud services in small and medium enterprises along ways to mitigate them.

Cloud Computing: A Business Revolution

According to (Mckinsey & Company, 2021) statistical figure, Businesses in every industry can get best value of cloud computing at which out of 487 companies from all industries, EBITDA impact estimated an increase of more than 20% by the year of 2030.

Best Practices for Adopting Cloud Computing

1- Retail Business

Retailers use cloud computing to offer an extraordinary customer service and organize inventory process. As per (Xie et al., 2021), E-Business Cloud Computing Model (EBCCM) is considered in China to make an activated cost shortcut for the retail and wholesale online ordering and selling.

Efficiently, purchasing and selling data were utilized by (EBCCM) to measure customers behavior and take required actions to enhance their satisfaction by 95.6%. Moreover, this kind of cloud models proved itself in cutting the start-up cost for production, organizing the retail industry and increasing the wholesale revenue ratio by 98.2%.

2- Health and Medical Industry

Cloud computing is applied in this industry to specifically assemble and execute massive data besides offering running time and cost. In (Fusaro et al., 2011) research, they took the advantage of cloud computing to store and process complicated genomic-related data. A biomedical cloud system was implemented with Amazon Web in order to expedite certain genomic sequencing mapping and to process prototyping services.

Source: (Fusaro et al., 2011)

3- E-Commerce

Cloud-based e-commerce softwares allows consumers and e-businesses to react swiftly to any come-up opportunity while managing products and customers data in addition to operational systems with minimal effort and time. (Almarabeh et al., 2019)

Source: (Almarabeh et al., 2019)

4- Petrol and Gas Industry

Oil and gas companies employ automated forecasting to automate supply-and-demand modeling and reduce the need for manual analysis. (Perrons et al., 2013) argued the most appropriate type of cloud modules and discussed the implications of shifting towards the public cloud, and calls for more of the oil and gas industry's services to be offered through cloud-based apps.

5- Food Industry

(Mckinsey & Company, 2021) documented a real case of cloud computing usage in food industry. During 2020 COVID'19 lockdowns, the online orders for a fast-food chain was shooting from 50,000 to 400,000 per day. Thanks to the cloud computing migration, the company’s online-or during system could handle this huge volume. The chains' management decided to implement the migration plan in less than one year, instead of five years.

6- Automotive Industry

The cloud computing ride is also utilized by automakers . An automotive company uses a cloud system that serves 124 plants, 500 warehouses, and 1,500 suppliers to keep up time-offering data from machines, systems, logistics tracking, and provide insights on work processes. Using cloud system could save 30% of company's' costs by 2025 and motivate for more creation. ((Mckinsey & Company, 2021)

7- E-Learning

Some apps for cloud computing in the education sector include online distant learning programs and student attendance platforms. (Bora & Ahmed, 2013) outlined the advantages of adopting cloud services for e-learning, particularly for institutions and colleges that necessitate a considerable budget in terms of hardware.

Conclusion

Information systems like cloud computing have the potential to change the world significantly and create new business revolution models. Cloud migration offers businesses a wide range of advantages like increasing revenue and cutting down operational costs. In contrary, there are still long way challenges that cloud computing must mitigate especially with security and data privacy of users.  

References

Almarabeh, T., & Majdalawi, Y. K. (2019). Cloud Computing of E-commerce. Modern Applied Science, 13(1), 27-35.

Azarnik, A., Shayan, J., Alizadeh, M., & Karamizadeh, S. (2012). Associated risks of cloud computing for SMEs. Open International Journal of Informatics, 1(1), 37-45.

Bora, U. J., & Ahmed, M. (2013). E-learning using cloud computing. International Journal of Science and Modern Engineering, 1(2), 9-12.

Carroll, M., Van Der Merwe, A., & Kotze, P. (2011, August). Secure cloud computing: Benefits, risks and controls. In 2011 Information Security for South Africa (pp. 1-9). IEEE.

Fusaro, V. A., Patil, P., Gafni, E., Wall, D. P., & Tonellato, P. J. (2011). Biomedical cloud computing with amazon web services. PLoS computational biology, 7(8), e1002147.

Madhavaiah, C., Bashir, I., & Shafi, S. I. (2012). Defining Cloud Computing in business perspective: a review of research. Vision, 16(3), 163-173.

McKinsey & Company. (2021, February 26). Cloud's trillion-dollar prize is up for grabs. McKinsey & Company. Retrieved March 18, 2023, from https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/clouds-trillion-dollar-prize-is-up-for-grabs

Perrons, R. K., & Hems, A. (2013). Cloud computing in the upstream oil & gas industry: A proposed way forward. Energy Policy, 56, 732-737.

Sether, A. (2016). Cloud computing benefits. Available at SSRN 2781593.

XIE, A., Kadry, S. N., & Hsu, C. H. (2021). The Implication of E-Business Management in China Wholesale and Retail Industries. Journal of Multiple-Valued Logic & Soft Computing, 36.

Amazon Web Services. (2021, July 14). What is cloud computing? | amazon web services. YouTube. Retrieved March 20, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxT233EdY5c