Cloud & SaaS - will they have a silver lining?

Cloud computing is a vast shift in IT delivery mechanisms and the big boys are involved - Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google etc. Pay-as-you-drink computing will have lots of advantages over the traditional licensed approach for software delivery.

So, the Big Switch is on now that computing power, storage and communications have reached a critical mass, a concept called 'Cloud' computing is about to become widely adopted. It will mean vastly cheaper software, storage and operations, in some cases by a factor of 10.

Small businesses are likely to be the early adaptors of this technology; however the combined impact of huge cost reductions, minimal infrastructure requirement and a reduced or eliminated need for I.T. staff makes this technology unbeatable, in most marketplaces, over time.
 
The sheer speed at which a company can be up and running utilising SaaS-type computing – ie procurement, configuration and deployment - is a strong enough argument in itself to drive the technology at a rapid pace.  While the use of SaaS guarantees that everyone will be using the latest version of the software, always.

The market hurdles facing the SaaS stampede are unlikely to slow its progress. Some experts have noted issues such as Integration of the software with any existing systems within the company becoming a problem or a requirement of most SaaS vendors for external hosting of data. However, there are opposing advantages - the need for SaaS to cover all options in a marketplace means that businesses are provided with software that has a comprehensive list of configurable options. These options would to be extremely expensive to deliver were they constructed within a tailored software delivery within a single organisation. Also, external hosting is a security asset as well as an operational liability; provided that a business takes local copies (an option provided by most SaaS vendors) the outcome is a best of both worlds. This technology ‘Cloud’ certainly does have a silver lining!