SMART Consultants Cloud-Based SaaS Feasibility Study

1133 Words3 Pages

Cloud computing has captured the attention and imagination of the business and IT worlds as of late. A general atmosphere of positive analysis surrounds the potential and future of cloud computing. “In May 2008, Merrill Lynch . . . estimated the cost advantages of Cloud Computing to be three to five times for business applications and more than five times for consumer applications” (Slabeva 2010, 47). An IDC forecast suggested a near three-fold growth of spending on cloud-related services from 2008 to 2012, attaining forty-two billion dollars (Slabeva 2010). Amid all these forecasts and positive predictions, it seems obvious that the cloud is here to stay, and that those who harness it correctly will have the opportunity to grow their business, seemingly almost indefinitely.

Cloud-based applications, or Software as a Service (SaaS), is contended as the reason cloud computing came about in the first place (Marks 2010). To the end user, cloud-based applications are what make cloud computing work; they’re the applications of the Internet. Applications such as Google Docs, which includes, among other things, a word processor, a spreadsheet creator, and even a drawing tool; SalesForce.com, which offers a wide array of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools; and 37signals, which offers a number of business collaboration tools, all available on the cloud.

Businesses can benefit greatly from the utilization of cloud-based applications. “Cloud computing offers away to reduce IT infrastructure costs through a combination of capital expense avoidance, pay-as-you-go capacity, better utilization of virtualized commodity computing capacity, and reduced operational costs by requiring fewer internal IT resources to focus on commodity infr...

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...mation. http://sas70.com/sas70_overview.html (accessed May 13, 2011).

Slabeva, Katarina, Thomas Wozniak, and Santi Ristol. Grid and Cloud Computing: A business perspective on technology and applications. Heidelberg: Springer, 2010.

FCC. See Federal Communications Commission.

Federal Communications Commission. 2009. Connecting America: The national broadband plan. http://download.broadband.gov/plan/national-broadband-plan.pdf

Verizon. "Verizon | Verizon Completes SAS 70 Type II Examination of Cloud Computing Data Centers." Verizon | News Center - Homepage. http://newscenter.verizon.com/press-releases/verizon/2011/verizon-completes-sas-70-type.html (accessed May 2, 2011).

Weier, Mary Hayes. "The Truth About SaaS & Security." Workday Feature Articles. http://www.workday.com/innovation/featured_articles/the_truth_about_saas_and_security.php (accessed May 14, 2011).

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