Dec

How Cloud is Helping Organizations Foster Innovation?

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For a majority of the companies and small businesses the shift to a cloud platform is a result of a cost reduction goal and the increased agility and flexibility it has to offer. However, many of these companies do not look beyond the obvious benefits and think of cloud has a platform to drive innovation and research which is quite a possibility with the proven capabilities of cloud.

At a recent OSFY event many speakers echoed the same thoughts about the cloud web hosting being more than a storage solution. Companies can utilize a cloud environment to test new business concepts and analyze its feasibility as well.

Researchers can experiment and observer its results and take their study in the desired direction and find solutions to problems with the help of a cloud solution. Initial research on small scale can be easily conducted using a cloud service as it does not require review procedure due to its relatively smaller requirement. Users can quickly function using the cloud and that too without straining their budget.

The quick provisioning of resources and the pay as you go model of cloud allows smaller groups to conduct researched in a more efficient manner. Contrary to a traditional model where the resources once procured were locked in for a particular period, but with a cloud IaaS model users can instantly decommission their services and save on a lot of cost on the unused resources.

“With anytime access to data from any geographical location, collaboration has been made very easy and teams can work on projects and make decision faster”

Driving Innovation

Use of cloud services like IaaS and PaaS is on the rise with companies that are heavily focused on innovation. Many of these firms are inclined towards the cloud due to the analytical environment it provides and the ability to focus resources in areas where innovation is possible.

According to a recent survey of organizations, out of the 800 respondents that were questioned almost 20% of those respondents were focused on using cloud services for driving research and analysis apart from the more common goals of cost reduction and increased efficiency. These organizations were also more likely to take decision backed by data.

Organizations which are inclined towards making more from the cloud are also looking for insights which their competitors cannot find or have chosen to ignore. These companies have shown better ability to use cloud-based analytics and discover insights from the available data. The cloud can very well handle an analytical environment and do it rather efficiently compared to a traditional model. It also has the ability to share the findings with other users which can benefits from the results and use it in their own ways.

Simply gaining insights from data and using analytics is not enough and it is necessary that the findings are made accessible to the decision makers of the organization as well. With the cloud’s ability to make data easily accessible the business leaders can take the right decisions much quickly.

And this is how Cloud is helping executives take decisions backed by data and speed up innovation.

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