The biggest tech shift since the commencement of the Internet is happening right now as cloud computing makes significant strides to augment core business competencies. Given its track record, most business analysts and enterprises are confident about its commitment w.r.t performance, flexibility, and agility. Besides, Gartner’s and Forrester’s revelations of ‘total cost of ownership’ reduction, another key attribute is contributing to soaring cloud growth. These savings are typically garnered by expediting the implementation, deployment and upgradation process; declining server/software sprawls; making the best use of the deployed IT resources; lowering hardware and related IT costs. At the outset, these were the key takeaways from the public cloud hosting platform which now proves befitting for private clouds as well. 

So the question that crops up in the mind is – if these two platforms bestow the same capabilities then how they are different and why named differently? The public cloud hosting solution is a platform accessible to all genres of user, such as Google Maps. The map provides satellite and street view of the states, union territories and cities of a specific country to end-users’ with the help of the Google Earth data. On the contrary, private cloud is a platform that is hosted; however the access to the suite of hosted IT resources is confined to one business and its subsidiaries. Each client runs its own version of applications that their business can leverage from. 

Technology pundits consider public cloud as the real commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solution. COTS solutions are thought to save time and capital expenses allied to development and lifecycle phases of a software application. Over the past few years, some of the on premise solutions are related to COTS category, however; the façade is different, which explicitly explains that every on premise solution is not compliant to COTS. Certain transportation management systems (TMS) backed up by public cloud hosting solutions relates to true commercial-off-the-shelf systems category. 

According to Wikipedia, a TMS is a subset of any supply chain management related to transportation operations and may play vital role in enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Idyllically, this subset lies between ERP and warehouse/distribution module. IT administrators can deploy on premise solution barring the customization efforts.  Private cloud solutions provide complete flexibility to a business to customize its settings according to their applications need. Moreover, the market dynamics doesn’t show the aforementioned trend in this connection, especially among SMBs. However, as we are living in an application economy, this new development is quite plausible. 

Good’s and Worst's of Customization

Many analysts believe that software that relates to CTOS is the best. A few of the companies believe that flexibility to customize a software product according to the business needs help them to deliver something unique and efficient to their end-users. Another few companies believe that software should be the one that fits the IT architecture instead mounting pressure on IT to transform the operations w.r.t to the software configuration. Unfortunately, these two business approaches can give rise to serious nuisances. 

It is observed that, when software applications are customized multiple times, chances for bugs also get higher. As a matter of fact, these software products get deflected from the functionality that they are originally built for. Flexibility to customize is held responsible for the burgeoned cause. Despite performing successful customizations, many of the organizations confess that they have encountered issues when commencing upgradation process. And, they consider upgradation a mistake as they are forced to invest on solution to get the mistakes corrected. 

Of all these reasons, business strategists skip upgradation owing to time-intensive and expensive upgradation process. Herein, the example of warehouse management system fit the situation. 

Cloud to Rescue

As the whole world is now acquainted with the fact that cloud makes upgradation process much easier than any other prevailing technology.  Its attributes and various research reports clearly suggest that businesses will have the potential to retain their cloud-based solutions for a longer period of time over any conventional solutions. To put this into perspective, it will continue to give access to new features and functionalities that will satisfy both current and futuristic business growth. Companies need to upgrade their systems no matter whether they make use of a public cloud or private cloud. Reportedly, a few of the software patches occur without coming in the notice of users. The upgradation which consumes time and is expensive is generally done once or twice in a year. As compared to traditional systems, cloud enables organizations to leverage functionalities that best fits their requirements. 

Although, most of the cloud solutions do not provide room for customization – don’t misinterpret that it restricts users to tailor solution as per their company’s needs and norms.  The advanced software configuration platforms allow having one instance of advanced software to manage different facilities. Besides, cloud eliminates the cost incurred on adding new servers, professionals, and space. Irrespective of the fact that a host of organizations are making use of one (same) software instance, the software can be configured to sa0074isfy the dynamic demands of each organization. 

To conclude the same, the cloud era has led to many cost-savings keeping performance at par with clients’ expectations. Had the cloud been not there, from innovation to agility, and implementation to upgradation would not be that swifter as it seems today. The cloud enables SMBs to manage their existing resources and focus on core competencies with a bang.