The public view from the cloud…

More and more businesses around the world are turning to public cloud solutions in an effort to mitigate operational expenses, improve their flexibility, effectively tackle new challenges and overcome competition, enhance their customer-centric philosophy, and so on. This also applies to businesses and organizations that have been operating for several decades in crucial industries, such as energy, and are certainly not “famous” for their flexibility or innovative vision.

The first question that comes to mind is why businesses should decide to trust the public cloud. First of all, there is a need to streamline business operations, so as to ensure their future operation. Then, they have to find a way to effectively compete with other players that have developed new technologies and are aspiring to take their place in the market. Furthermore, when a business or an organization offers the same product, with no variations in terms of shape, size, color or quantity, and there are no significant differences from the competition, the differentiation itself lies in services, quality and price. Other factors that should be taken into consideration are the abilities of the existing data centers and the general hosting management environment, as well as provisioning, which are usually one step before “crashing” and making the applications literally useless. So, the most promising solution is the transition to the public cloud.

Thus, it is evident that an organization’s cloud computing strategy plays an important role in its daily operations, as it covers a series of parameters that extend from ensuring its seamless business operation to achieving economies of scale to the benefit of its customers.

Business executives and managers actually believe that cloud computing, and especially the public one, has now entered its maturity phase, having solved issues and questions mostly related to security, and is highly competitive in terms of investment cost.

Finally, thanks to the advanced programming languages (e.g. .Net), developers can now design and provide new services and applications exceptionally quickly and easily, using for example Microsoft’s Azure public cloud. This is yet another argument in favor of public cloud, especially if you consider that such services or applications can be directly addressed to end-clients, thus enhancing the customer-centric philosophy in the best possible way.