The core of the cloud approach is not a specific technology, but a business model where you can rent IT resources as needed. Depending on the nature of these resources, a distinction is made between software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
Economic importance
An example of SaaS is Microsoft Dynamics CRM online, which means that the CRM system can no longer be operated by itself, but in a Microsoft data center. Also in this direction is the development of industry solutions: for example, the drebis solution, with which adesso AG simplifies the handling of claims between lawyers and legal expenses insurance.
More flexibility
Examples of PaaS offerings for individual software platforms are Microsoft Azure and Google AppEngine. At IaaS, only virtual hardware is provided. One example is Amazon Web Services. SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS can be publicly available (public cloud) or only within an organization (private cloud).
Faster deployment
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Conclusion
Both variants are also very interesting from the economic point of view: Finally, for cloud providers, the construction of a public cloud is accompanied by a high capital requirement. The vendor uses scale effects to make IT infrastructures cost-effective
. For cloud users, renting resources is a cost advantage compared to running in-house.
But this only works properly with a public cloud - in a private cloud, the cloud user must have sufficient physical resources. Unfortunately, no public-cloud approaches can be used in many areas for legal reasons or for reasons of data protection.
At first sight, the use of cloud infrastructures does not appear to be meaningful in such cases because the private cloud does not have the economic benefits of the public cloud, or at least to the same extent as the public cloud.
However, the reduction of the cloud on such scale effects does not do justice to the topic. After all, it was a long time before the Cloud was available to use a wide range of outsourcing solutions to reduce the cost of IT resources.
The permanent increase in efficiency in the company has long been commonplace. The innovation of cloud approaches is to provide solutions much easier and more quickly. You just have to log into a portal and book the resources you need - be it computers, run-off environments for applications or accounts in a CRM system.
Complex and time-consuming manual processes are no longer required. This allows cloud users to use much more IT resources than users of the classic business model.
It was precisely this increased flexibility that made Cloud providers, such as Amazon and Google, initially create an internal private cloud infrastructure that they later opened to external users.
By using these approaches, it was possible to launch products much faster on the market and gain a competitive advantage through the reduced time to market. In this context, the cloud allows the optimization of opportunity costs as more opportunities can be exploited on the market.
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Especially for software development, there are significant advantages: While the setup of test and staging environments takes a very long time, you can significantly reduce these times with cloud approaches. You can use PaaS solutions that already have a standardized environment.
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Each PaaS offer can only offer specific environments and therefore limits the configuration possibilities. As a result, standardization can be improved in an IT landscape, which in turn reduces costs and optimizes operation.
The use of such standardized environments is not always possible because the requirements for the environments are often not uniform enough. This is particularly true of software that was originally implemented without consideration for such cloud infrastructures.
In such cases, the required hardware infrastructure - computing and storage capacity - can be made quite simple with an IaaS solution, but you have to install the required software infrastructure on your own.
In order to automate such processes, continuous delivery approaches can be used. In this process, environments including the individual software developed are automatically installed.
This not only reduces the costs, but also increases the security of the software, since the necessary processes have already been passed through in the development of test and staging environments.
Possible errors are usually already fixed. This significantly reduces the risk of software implementation. This means that new versions of the software can be delivered to production more quickly, which in turn reduces the opportunity costs.
This approach is a logical continuation of the agile software development, at the end of each iteration a new release for the installation is available. With cloud or continuous delivery approaches, you can actually bring this software into production, which allows feedback from production, and better align the software development with the situation.
Cloud computing is not just a model that reduces operating costs. In fact, this has already been successfully implemented with numerous other approaches, such as virtualization.
The truly new aspect is simplified access to IT resources through self-service portals and further automation. This allows IT services to be used more quickly, which makes it possible to react faster to changing requirements and new opportunities.
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Especially for software development projects, it is thus possible to work much more productively through easier access to test and staging environments. In addition, IT services can be much easier and better suited to the needs of the departments, which will further increase the value of IT in the future.
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