What is cloud computing? Everyone in the technology world is talking about it… and a lot of people in the business world are asking the same question, “What is cloud computing, and what does it mean for my business?”

Cloud computing platforms are growing in popularity, but why? What unique advantages does a cloud computing architecture offer to companies in today’s economic climate? And what just what is cloud computing, anyway?” Let’s explore the cloud computing infrastructure and its impact on critically important areas to IT, like security, infrastructure investments, business application development, and more.

Most IT departments are forced to spend a significant portion of their time on frustrating implementation, maintenance, and upgrade projects that too often don’t add significant value to the company’s bottom line. Increasingly, IT teams are turning to cloud computing technology to minimize the time spent on lower-value activities and allow IT to focus on strategic activities with greater impact on the business.

The fundamental cloud computing infrastructure has won over the CIOs of some of the world’s largest organizations—these once-skeptical executives never looked back after experiencing first-hand the host of benefits delivered by cloud computing technology.

• Proven Web-services integration. By their very nature, cloud computing technology is much easier and quicker to integrate with your other enterprise applications (both traditional software and cloud computing infrastructure-based), whether third-party or homegrown.
• World-class service delivery. Cloud computing infrastructures offer much greater scalability, complete disaster recovery, and impressive uptime numbers.
• No hardware or software to install: a 100% cloud computing infrastructure. The beauty of cloud computing technology is its simplicity… and in the fact that it requires significantly fewer capital expenditures to get up and running.
• Faster and lower-risk deployment. You can get up and running in a fraction of the time with a cloud computing infrastructure. No more waiting months or years and spending millions of dollars before anyone gets to log into your new solution. Your cloud computing technology applications are live in a matter of weeks or months, even with extensive customization or integration.
• Support for deep customizations. Some IT professionals mistakenly think that cloud computing technology is difficult or impossible to customize extensively, and therefore is not a good choice for complex enterprises. The cloud computing infrastructure not only allows deep customization and application configuration, it preserves all those customizations even during upgrades. And even better, cloud computing technology is ideal for application development to support your organization’s evolving needs.
• Empowered business users. Cloud computing technology allows on-the-fly, point-and-click customization and report generation for business users, so IT doesn’t spend half its time making minor changes and running reports.
• Automatic upgrades that don’t impact IT resources. Cloud computing infrastructures put an end to a huge IT dilemma: If we upgrade to the latest-and-greatest version of the application, we’ll be forced to spend time and resources (that we don’t have) to rebuild our customizations and integrations. Cloud computing technology doesn’t force you to decide between upgrading and preserving all your hard work, because those customizations and integrations are automatically preserved during an upgrade.

A Cloud Computing Infrastructure: What’s the Value?

The cloud computing infrastructure promises significant savings in administrative costs—more than 50 percent in comparison to client/server software. The areas in which cloud computing saves administrative costs include:

• Basic customization - cloud computing technology’s point-and-click tools empower administrators and business users to perform basic customizations themselves.
• Real-time reporting. Easy wizards step users through report and dashboard creation, so IT’s queue is free of report requests.
• Security and sharing models. The sharing model built into cloud computing infrastructure protects sensitive data while making the management of security profiles much less time-consuming.
• Multiple languages and currencies. Included support for 13 languages and all currencies make managing a global application easier.

No wonder so many CIOs are restructuring their companies around a cloud computing infrastructure.

Cloud Computing Technology & Application Development

Cloud computing technology is sparking a huge change in application development circles. Just like the changes that moved publishing technology from paper to bits, making it possible for us to have information about anything in the world right at our fingertips in a flash, the move to a cloud computing infrastructure for application development is making it possible to build robust, enterprise-class applications in a fraction of the time and at a much lower cost.

Cloud platform ushers in a new era of applications in the cloud that bring the power and success of CRM to your whole company—not just sales, service, and marketing. New types of application innovation are now possible through a combination of “no programming” point-and-click wizards, toolkits for the most popular development languages for creating client-side applications, and Apex Code

• Cloud computing technology boasts all the benefits of multitenancy, including built-in security, reliability, upgradeability, and ease of use.
• Out-of-the-box features such as analytics, offline access, and mobile deployment speed application development.
• There’s no need to worry about managing and maintaining any server infrastructure, even as applications scale to thousands of users.

By eliminating the problems of traditional application development, cloud computing technology frees you to focus on developing business applications that deliver true value to your business (or your customers).