As shown in Figure, the promise of the cloud both on the business front (the attractive cloudonomics) and the technology front widely aided the CxOs to spawn out several non-mission critical IT needs from the ambit of their captive traditional data centers to the appropriate cloud service.
Invariably, these IT needs had some common features: They were typically Web-oriented; they represented seasonal IT demands; they were amenable to parallel batch processing; they were non-mission critical and therefore did not have high security demands. They included scientific applications too.
Several small and medium business enterprises, however, leveraged the cloud much beyond the cautious user. Many startups opened their IT departments exclusively using cloud services—very successfully and with high ROI.
Having observed these successes, several large enterprises have started successfully running pilots for
leveraging the cloud. Many large enterprises run SAP to manage their operations. SAP itself is experimenting with running its suite of products: SAP Business One as well as SAP Netweaver on Amazon cloud offerings. Gartner, Forrester, and other industry research analysts predict that a substantially significant percentage of the top enterprises in the world would have migrated a majority of their IT needs to the cloud offerings by 2012, thereby demonstrating the widespread impact and benefits from cloud computing.
Indeed the promise of the cloud has been significant in its impact.
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