A Majority of Companies Turn to Cloud Computing For Business Activities

SOURCE: The Nation

The vast majority of senior executives globally say their organisations have already moved at least some business activities to cloud computing and expect 2012 investment to skyrocket, with some companies planning to spend more than a fifth of their information technology budget on “Cloud” next year, according to a report by KPMG International.

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a metered service over a network [typically the internet], according to wikipedia.

Clearly, these findings proclaim, ‘the Cloud is now,'” said Scott Cameron, executive director, Advisory, KPMG Thailand. “Clearly Cloud is transcending IT and widely impacting business operations, as a full third of survey respondents said it would fundamentally change their business, which is significant considering many organisations are still developing their Cloud strategies.” KPMG is a global network of professional firms providing audit, tax and advisory services.

In a KPMG global survey of organisations that will use the Cloud, as well as companies that will provide Cloud services, economic factors were cited by 76 percent of both groups as an important driver for Cloud adoption. However, a number of other considerations were equally or more important: 80 percent said the switch to Cloud was driven by efforts to improve processes, offering more agility across the enterprise; 79 percent of users and 76 percent of providers said they saw it as having technical benefits, in some cases improvements that they otherwise could not gain from their own data centers; and, 76 percent said the use of Cloud would have strategic benefits, possibly including transforming their business models to gain a competitive advantage.

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