Many businesses today are looking for a way to significantly reduce ongoing IT capital and operating expenditures yet maintain a world-class IT infrastructure. The question is: How do you do it? How can you cut down on IT capital expenditures and ongoing IT operating costs, yet maintain a competitive IT infrastructure? With traditional IT infrastructure, you can’t. You’re stuck. You need all the hardware and software, and floor space and cooling and staff and labor-intensive system maintenance. That’s what traditional distributed computing infrastructure requires.

Introducing Cloud Computing
Wouldn’t it be nice if IT infrastructure were like the infrastructure to deliver water or electricity? Just turn on the service, as much or as little as you want, when you want it. You pay nothing when you’re not using it. The service is reliable, high quality and inexpensive.

Cloud computing is the model for delivering IT infrastructure as simply as water from the tap or electricity from the socket. Cloud computing makes every element of IT infrastructure available as an on-demand service—operating systems, applications, storage, servers, appliances and workflow management. You don’t have to make capital expenditures or maintain an IT department. You simply turn on the tap and it is delivered. You pay only for what you use.

Cloud computing revolutionizes computing in the same way that industrialization revolutionized goods production. It creates large, extremely efficient service providers that are able to produce IT infrastructure services in high volume at low cost and renders small operations uncompetitive.  

Cost savings, flexibility and scalability abound
The primary benefit to businesses will be significant cost savings. “An OnDemand business app in the Cloud would cost a customer a third of an OnPremise client-server app over a five-year cycle,” according to Merrill Lynch*. You make no capital purchase other than a computer and Internet connection, and only need to pay for the services used.  With no infrastructure to support, you can significantly reduce IT headcount. You can use the money saved to develop new products and revenue streams or just reduce your bottom line.

There is also no vendor lock in. You are not saddled with hardware or software that ties you down for years as you amortize the capital expense. You are not stuck with a subpar product or an unresponsive vendor. You can change vendors when you wish, as often as you wish.

Finally, you can immediately and massively scale up or down for spikes in computing demand, for growth or for decline. You don’t need to overprovision to prepare for high demand cycles or to engage expensive long-term resources that exceed your short-term needs in anticipation of future growth.

Getting Started
Cloud computing can be an answer to the dilemma of having to maintain world-class IT infrastructure while needing to significantly reduce IT budgets. Like all major changes in industry and technology, it is important to adopt the change early, but also wisely. Investigate the cloud services available and the strength and viability of the service provider. Survey your legacy technology and determine which parts are cloud-ready, then investigate how moving them to the cloud environment can affect your infrastructure and bottom line. Test the cloud environment by moving one or two services in your infrastructure to the cloud. Once you have gained enough insight and feel comfortable, you can put a plan in place to determine when and how to expose all your infrastructure services as cloud services.

Learn about the Citrix Cloud Center