Should Business Move to the Cloud

What business benefits do cloud computing services provide? What problems do they solve?

Cloud computing helps us build a large database, and can help us to quickly find the desired information. This improves the work efficiency. In the case, the Zynga Company uses cloud computing to store data and transmit data.  When a new game is in the test phase and the company is not sure how many customers, they use the Amazon cloud.  With the development of society, more and more multinational companies are using the cloud, not only because of cost savings, but because people worldwide can access the cloud, provided they have an Internet connection.

What are the disadvantages of cloud computing?

Using the cloud computing, the two major disadvantages are security and reliability. In this case study, Amazon’s cloud service has shown significant outages in 2011 and 2012, causing serious consequences. There are many large sites are using Amazon’s cloud computing, so Amazon’s cloud computing failure will not only affect  Amazon, but also spread to many other companies and have a great impact on them. According to the Paris International Group of a report, after investigation they found that each year there are about ten hours or more the server fails. Another important issue is security. “By leveraging a remote cloud based infrastructure, a company essentially gives away private data and information, things that might be sensitive and confidential. It is then up to the cloud service provider to manage, protect and retain them, thus the provider’s reliability is very critical.

How do the concepts of capacity planning, scalability, and TCO apply to this case? Apply these concepts both to Amazon and to subscribers of its services.

Amazon must provide hardware capacity planning and scalability. With the development of information technology, Amazon will have more and more customers. Not just Amazon, but Amazon’s customer requires a large database to store a variety of data and information. This will help the company grow. Amazon must bear the total TCO of its services, while Amazon is also needed to maintain the profitability of the company. However, the services’ subscribers benefit from not having to worry about these issues.

What kinds of businesses are most likely to benefit from using cloud Computing? Why?

As information technology and social development, there have been more and more companies need cloud services. First, the information Internet companies need to use cloud services, such as Facebook, Google, Ebay, etc. Because the cloud computing can store large information, and share the information. Second, large multinational corporations, one of the advantages about the cloud computing is that people from around the world can get a faster connection. Cloud services can help employees of multinational corporations to establish good communication channels and share the company’s resources. This saves the cost of the work to help multinational companies, improve work efficiency. Meanwhile, cloud computing is not perfect, it is sometimes also appear outage. Therefore, it is recommended to use cloud computing company “would be a major risk consider using another computing service as a backup.”