Benefits of Cloud Computing

The primary reason many organizations are adopting cloud computing services is for potential cost reduction and amortization. With a cloud computing solution the customer doesn’t have a big upfront capital expenditure for hardware, software licenses and implementation services. In addition they don’t have the ongoing expense of administering the hardware and infrastructure software. Most cloud computing solutions offer a pay as you go model or subscription so customers pay an operating expense based on what they use which includes hardware, software, and administration. To businesses, that translates to hard dollars: servers the company won't have to buy and maintain, databases for which the company won't have to buy licenses, free storage, backup, and disaster-recovery services—all of which mean IT personnel that the company doesn't have to hire and pay salaries and health care for.

Another huge benefit offered through cloud computing is solving an organizations data center capacity constraints and costs. In large corporations such as accounting firms there can be extreme data center capacity limitations. The data centers are so full that they need to remove a server for any server they add. Because these cloud vendors are optimized for large-scale hosts, they can serve corporate customers. Also with cloud computing there are many security benefits which are really important for accounting firms to prevent data theft, as mentioned in Craig Balding's blog which are:

(1) Centralized Data
(2) Incident Response/Forensics
(3) Password assurance testing
(4) Logging
(5) Improve the state of security software (performance)
(6) Secure builds
(7) Security Testing

Cloud computing as proven above gives firms time and value at reduced risk compared to an in-house implementation. Accounting firms want fast solutions so they can see the value of their investments. The time, expense and risk in developing and implementing an internal solution can be very expensive and adds no value until installed. The risk is significantly reduced with cloud computing because the vendor already has the solution running. Also if customers do not see the value in cloud computing they can cancel their subscription so this motivates vendors to provide the best service possible.

Where do you agree/disagree? Why?