Cloud’s impact on internal company’s structures

Some time ago I shared my observations about advantages of working in the cloud. The feeling that I hed not exhausted the topic made me decide to continue the thread. This time, however, I’m focusing on the impact of cloud computing on the company’s structure and internal relations, as well as the comfort of work. Indeed! In my opinion cloud computing brings number of benefits not only in technical aspect, but also affects the internal structures of company. Surprised?

High standards of service providing

Server rooms have to meet very high standards including additional power supply, security against intrusion, access for selected employees only, protection by a professional company or conditions inside the server rooms. All of this is done for ensure that both IT equipment and data storage security are at the best security level. It is also hard not to notice that such a high level of security is difficult to achieve in the companies’ own server rooms. which do not specialize in IT technologies and have limited resources for their development.

Better cooperation and communication inside the company

Data canters provides cloud services are responsible for the proper functioning – often crucial for companies – systems and applications, but I have exhausted this topic earlier. So I would like to move on to advantages of another, not less important, order.

It might seem that impact of cloud computing on the company’s structure is small. However, from my experience as a project manager, the added value of such solution is the improvement of cooperation and communication inside the company. With cloud data, employees gain an access to environment and can freely share any data among themselves. This significantly improves and accelerate their work and also helps to systematize it. Additionally, they get 24/7 access to data from any device with Internet connection anywhere around the world.

Impact of cloud computing on company operations: greater productivity of the IT teams

It takes a lot of extra work for companies to maintain their own server rooms, including configuring hardware, administering of virtualization, replacing broken network-hardware components, installing patches, creating addressing and new vLans, routing, changing virtual machine parameters – and these are just a few examples. These activities not only consuming time of specialist and generate extra costs, but also increase the liability on the part of the company and risks arising from negligence in these areas. With the use of cloud services, responsibility for these asks is transferred to the provider, and  IT teams inside the company focus on business core.

Working control

For instance: a professional cloud service provider with own data centers provides power from two independent sources, as well as has generators which provide power even in the unlikely event of a power failure from two sources at the same time. It is difficult to find a company whose business core is not data processing that invest in such solution to improve IT security.

The comfort that comes from less risk related with potential failures is also what the customers I work with often point out. When provider is responsible for any equipment failures, internet connection or power outage, companies are able to focus on crucial business activities what affects their working comfort. When implementing cloud solution in a company, the responsible for the guaranteed service availability is on the provider. The service provider continuously monitors the service availability and also provides the specialist who detect and fix any failures and restore proper operation after a failure at a specified SLA (Service Level Agreement) level.