Cloud computing beneficial at the enterprise level

A recent CIO.com article analyzed how cloud computing has become beneficial at the enterprise level, offering even the largest companies many advantages. These benefits include its agility, ease of use, scalability and lower costs for operational expenses.

"Our No. 1 ambition for cloud computing is economic," said Johan Goossens, head of NATO Allied Command Transformation's Technology & Human Factors Branch in Norfolk, Virginia, CIO.com reports. "With reduced budgets everywhere in the world and certainly in defense spending, we need to consolidate IT operations. And we think that the cloud offers us a chance to achieve some of that consolidation while improving information flows [among the 28 NATO nations] and allowing us to save some money."

Despite Goossens' statement, other enterprises have had trouble quantifying how much money the switch to cloud computing actually saves them. Furthermore, one independent cloud strategist believes proving how much a company saves by utilizing the managed IT service can be difficult.

The CIO article said one way to measure costs is for businesses to run their applications in cloud and then determine what the actual spend is. However, this method does present other difficulties when determining cost.

Despite these trials, several analyst firms' reports have found enterprise experience with the cloud have been positive. Thus, while some questions still linger for enterprises, the overall benefit has been well documented.