In a commissioned by EMC, the CEBR (Centre for Economics and Business Research) estimates that cloud computing could be worth €763bn to the top five European economies over the next five years and will see the creation of 2.4 million jobs.
Can this possibly be true? David Bradshaw, a cloud computing specialist at the analyst firm IDC, thinks it can.
“This is a big shift in the way things are done in the IT domain. It might be slow at the start but in ten years’ time, we’ll look back and see that it has transformed everything. It is at least as big a shift as the switch to client/server computing,” he says.
Whether you agree with the estimates or not, it seems inevitable that more and more companies will look to place their consumption of IT services with cloud providers in order to gain the benefits of cost stability, scalability and predictability.
Not just for the big boys
Small and medium sized companies stand to benefit most from the transformation because significant IT spend usually represents a higher percentage of their capital budget than it would at an enterprise business. A cloud service levels the playing field in terms of the sophistication of technology that a SME can afford.
In addition, a SME will often benefit from improved flexibility – home and remote working, temporary and agency staff, mobile access are all bundled with a cloud offering and require no complex systems at the SME.
If you’re an SME thinking of upgrading that server in the corner of the office, then think long and hard about the alternatives. Hosted virtual desktops could give you everything you need with no capital expenditure and unlimited scalability. Worth a look, surely?
