Management by Paul Engle
Industrial Engineer's monthly column about engineering management (May 2011)
IT in the clouds
I have been around long enough to witness several IT business revolutions. We’ve gone from computer leasing (1960s) to mini computers (1970s) to networking and client/servers (1990s) to the Internet.
The next step, aside from social networking, appears to be cloud computing. In cloud computing, IT-related capabilities are provided to external customers using Internet technologies. In layman’s terms, it outsources your data center. It can help companies reduce IT capital and operating costs. In addition, cloud computing is highly scalable – a company can increase its IT resources quickly with little or no capital investment. Cloud computing may reduce the need to hire expensive IT staff. This is attractive to new, rapidly growing enterprises that need to add capacity quickly with limited up-front expense.
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