Cloud computing is an approach to computing that leverages the efficient pooling of on-demand, self-managed virtual infrastructure, consumed as a service. Cloud computing provides IT with the ability to respond to business needs. IT innovation fuels greater business agility, and organizations can leverage the cloud’s ever-expandable, self-serviced and always-available infrastructure to speed the delivery and reliability of new and existing applications. What’s more, the efficiency of the cloud can free up funds for service-led innovation. The pooling of resources allows a private infrastructure or service provider to realize a cost savings from reduction of physical assets like server, storage, and network infrastructure required to deliver applications or services. Reduced infrastructure can lead to reduced power consumption and management costs. Cloud platforms offer policy-driven self-service characteristics that allow a private infrastructure or service provider to introduce levels of automation that reduce operational costs in delivering IT services, while also allowing standardization, security, and compliance to be more easily implemented and reported on. Cloud consumers, in this scenario, also realize the benefit of obtaining their cloud resources on demand and preventing traditional provisioning delays.

While cost advantages are an immediate driver for IT organizations to consider cloud, there are far bigger advantages. Increased business agility improves time to market, customer responsiveness and operational efficiency. In fact, our survey found that 75% of the respondents consider business agility as the top driver. Incorporate these benefits when building your business case and educate your key stakeholders and management. That said, IT and business executives are clearly succeeding in making the case for cloud. According to survey respondents, 26% of IT budgets have been allocated to cloud computing in the next 12 months.

This question goes back to the underlying architecture of the cloud, which the workloads run on. As long as redundancy is built into the architecture, applications will continue to run without issue even in the event of network downtime.