Moving on up: Journey to the Cloud!
Short History
The 'cloud' is a term that is frequently being used these days. Yet it first surfaced back in the mid-1990s at Compaq. It referred to distributed computing, a concept that was first visited in the 1960s by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, a government agency that is responsible for implementing the latest that technology has to offer.
Companies used to largely depend on hardware that would store their data on a physical server situated on their premises, hence the word 'on-premise'. As enterprises forged ahead to store their large operational data sets in these servers, they began to see their IT infrastructure being overwhelmed by the consistent demand of in/out data.
It also posed a pretty realistic problem which was the up-keeping, maintenance, and security of those on-premise servers. Companies like Dell and IBM made a killing by supplying the hardware and the associated services of those servers to enterprises of all sizes. It came to a point where a lot of organizations were setting up budgets just for IT maintenance alone, which cut into their bottom-line.
Going Mainstream
By any means, we've come a long way since those days. Innovation ushered in a new era where cloud computing has become a reality. In 2002, Amazon.com was struggling to meet the demands of the high volume transactions on their eCommerce website. The company had outgrown its on-premise infrastructure and was in desperate need of an upgrade.
Amazon was looking to solve this problem but executives soon realized that other huge companies experienced the same problem. An internal division was started, one that was deemed to be no more than an IT support wing. In 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was officially born, and through the pain of the parent company blossomed a cloud computing power that now claims the CIA, Verizon, Netflix, and more as clients.
So much was the success of AWS that other behemoths of the tech world got into the action including Google, Alibaba, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM to name a few. These companies, like AWS, offer cloud infrastructure, a public platform to host, build and deploy applications. This practice offers different parties of the value chain to serve their purpose, like an app builder needing a database service or a cybersecurity firm needing robust and scalable servers.
The race to be the leader of cloud providers has pivoted the business model of many companies like Oracle, which has made its name in Relational Databases
The Future of the Cloud and Enterprise Software
Enterprise applications were always feared to be too fragile to move around. They are often used by numerous users to accomplish a different set of tasks. Deploying huge types of applications is not easy and, for most companies, it is a huge financial burden when thinking about hardware infrastructure costs alone (never mind any downtime).
Be that as it may, not only does moving to the public cloud cut costs, it offers organizations to let cloud providers do what they do best: supply the agility and flexibility of a virtual IT infrastructure team. A business model is most commonly known as Paas/Iaas or Platform/Infrastructure-as-a-service business model.
The cloud can be classified into three categories, each nurture to a specific crowd. E.i Iaas is used for IT infrastructure personnel who wish to provision computing infrastructure to test, deploy and manage applications while maintaining data servers.
Published on Nov 17, 2020, this research article by Gartner estimates that public cloud services will grow by 18.4% in 2021 or to $304B. This growth was further accelerated by COVID-19 whereby workers are becoming more eager than ever to have 'access to high performing, content-rich and scalable infrastructure to perform their duties, which largely comes in the form of modernized and cloud-native applications.'
Our value proposition
As an application's business, iWork Technologies' first priority is building the most user friendly and intelligent software in the enterprise space. Yet our mantra has always been bettering the distribution of those applications, that's why we pride ourselves in being an agile Saas company.
Most companies have seen the benefits of going to the public cloud, they have their metric to prove that they are right. Since objectives are more sales-driven within organizations, a lot of CRM and Sales promoting cloud companies like Salesforce have seen success in migrating new entrants to the cloud.
Salesforce introduced the Saas model back in 1999. Its CRM software has revolutionized front-office operations
Our role is to make sure that all back-office systems are also deployed on the cloud. Modules like Accounting, Inventory Management, HR, and Logistics make up the backbone of multiple organizations. The move to the cloud shouldn't be daunting, in fact, it should be the opposite. In a recent report from June 2020, Mckinsey & Company states that the 'new normal' presented by COVID 'will accelerate the footprint of SaaS, given the growth of remote working, the rapid deployment of digital solutions, and the lower up-front costs.'
In Conclusion
The cloud is not just here to stay, it's here to revolutionize how we do business. iWork Technologies is constantly looking to leverage this software distribution channel by adding a plethora of technologies. One of them being RPA or Robotic Process Automation. But that's for another article.