Cloud computing is set to be the engine for business growth, as the economy moves into an era of renewed prosperity. With the global economic recovery steadily improving, and with companies under pressure to innovate and expand, an IT infrastructure that is both technologically and economically flexible is crucial to keep them agile.
Signs from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) indicate that the world is on a clear road to global economic recovery. Global growth will strengthen from 3% in 2013 to 3.6% in 2014, and 3.9% in 2015, says the organization.
This is good news, but it also comes with a caveat: the markets are unpredictable. The IMF warns that the recovery is disproportionate, with advanced economies rebounding faster than their emerging counterparts, meaning that opportunities are greater in some regions than others. US economic growth is up to 4%, for example.
This means that multinationals must be light on their feet, focusing on different regions as they move into a period of unpredictable economic growth. As the recovery continues, companies will find themselves having to allocate business and technology resources to different areas on an unexpected basis.
This is where cloud computing can help. Cloud computing offers them the chance to be both fleet-footed in their use of IT, and economically prudent.
Cloud computing complements the broad economic recovery because of its biggest attraction: agility. It helps enterprises moving into a period of expansion to be nimble enough to grasp the opportunities before them.
on, off and on again
Cloud-based computing, storage and network resources can be provisioned and deprovisioned at will, enabling large organizations to allocate resources where needed. This is all handled under a flexible licensing model that frees computing departments to serve the needs of the business.
These benefits are partly why so many companies are switching their IT infrastructures to it. Gartner believes that over half of new IT spend will be on cloud computing by 2016, and that investment is gradually moving from gradual to hybrid cloud computing services.
Private cloud will play an important part in the move to cloud computing. IDC’s five-year forecast for the worldwide private cloud IT infrastructure market shows an increase from $12 billion in 2012 to over $22 billion in 2017.
CIOs will drive this growth as they fold private cloud into their infrastructures, comforted by the security and reliability that it offers.
The cloud has bought IT and business departments together, meaning that the opportunities for CIOs to strategically support business growth are greater than ever before.
Recessions and recoveries are cyclical, and CIOs helping to support the current phase of business recovery have access to IT efficiencies that were not available in past cycles.
Companies that take advantage of cloud computing now will find themselves better positioned to profit from a macroscopic economic recovery, no matter what microscopic aberrations crop up in the world’s economies along the way.
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Editor in Chief, International, at Orange Business. I'm in charge of our International website and the English language blogs at Orange Business. In my spare time I'm literally captain of my own ship, spending my time on the wonderful rivers and canals of England.