We should not overlook some of the tradeoffs of cloud computing while appreciating its large spectrum of advantages. Every organization needs to assess its current needs and future growth objectives before concluding whether public cloud services would be appropriate for its business processes.

Benefits of cloud computing for SMBs

On a general note it is observed that most of the small and medium enterprises are able to exploit advantages offered by public IaaS cloud solutions including Google’s compute engine, or Azure by Amazon Web Services.
 
In contrast, it is found that large organizations are not able to extract as many benefits from cloud solutions as small or medium businesses. Therefore large enterprises are not very sure whether to adopt cloud or not. It would be interesting to know what cloud attributes cannot be exploited by bigger enterprises. 

It is reported by small and medium enterprises, that cloud solutions result in mitigation of capital expenditure. It is indeed a great relief for enterprises that are hard up on finances to adopt cloud computing that entirely obviates need to purchase costly equipment. 
These businesses are able to register healthy growth in revenues with a relatively thinner budget. Small businesses are also able to scale down their resources with more flexibility and often with just a few mouse clicks. 

Why cloud benefits have failed to impress large organizations

In case of large businesses the priorities are totally different. Since finance is no more a concern for such organizations, these can easily afford building and maintaining couple of own data centers. 

The enterprises value their performance more than saving on capital expenses. It is also possible for the large enterprises to allocate unused equipment to different projects due to sheer volume of workloads. 

One more common benefit of cloud computing for small and medium businesses is no need to hire competent IT professionals to look after on site IT infrastructure. Maintaining internal IT staff is also a costly proposal and small organizations can leverage cloud solutions to offload management of part or entire IT infrastructure. 

Large business houses are able to appoint the best of IT talent for management if their internal IT infrastructure. These enterprises need to have competent staff to manage their resources during critical events such as outage and so forth. 

It is found that internal talent is more adept to address any issues due to familiarity with systems, business processes, cabling, and physical hardware. No cloud service provider would be able to handle enterprise’s data, applications, and other IT needs as effectively as internal IT staff. 

Significant attributes of cloud that benefit large organizations

The above arguments are not aimed at establishing that cloud hosting solutions have absolutely no benefits to offer large business enterprises. In fact cloud has been proving to be a great resource for boosting development by creating environment for staging or testing of applications. 

There is no need for administrators of corporate infrastructure to build or logically isolate production network from environments of lab or testing. Cloud has been providing a great relief to large corporate to establish a global Content Distribution Network that can effectively reduce latency. 

Low latency content distribution across large regions would be extremely difficult even for large enterprises in the absence of CDN solution offered by cloud computing. 

Cloud is also providing efficient email services or video conferencing abilities to large organizations. In fact large business can offload email services to cloud to ensure a more economical option. 

It is observed that large organizations are not very keen to outsource their core business functions to cloud. Instead, cloud can prove to be a great resource to outsource business processes of secondary importance including email, telephonic communications, storage, or applications. Many big organizations are already leveraging Google Drive, SalesForce, or many IaaS providers to cater to their secondary processes. 

Cloud adoption scenario across large organizations

In spite of many arguments against cloud’s ability to support large organizations in the same way as it is supporting SMBs, we can witness cloud adoption across number of large organizations including GE, NetSuite, Amazon, or Sony to name a few. The extent of cloud adoption in large organization would not be significantly high, but there is a definite movement towards cloud adoption by big businesses.
 
There are endless opportunities in cloud computing and companies of all sizes are finding ways to use different attributes of cloud to their advantage. These are agility, accessibility, speed, and flexibility. It is found that many enterprises are successful at saving on operational expenses in addition to capital expenditure. 

It should be understood that merits and demerits of cloud computing will differ in case of different organizations as per wide range of variables. It is observed that smaller and medium sized businesses are more agile in terms of experimenting with new paradigms of technologies.

It is for the same reason these businesses have also been successful in extracting wide ranging benefits of cloud computing. Interestingly, more and more large organizations are leveraging the cloud and have begun to realize its distinct benefits.

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