Many manufacturing companies are gradually adopting cloud-based applications, considering the many advantages and the operational flexibility offered. The companies no longer shoulder the responsibility of running on-premises hardware and software to the internet. All the responsibility is taken over by the cloud computing vendor, and every hassle such as software upgrades and hardware maintenance are handled by them, which otherwise falls in the IT department’s sector. With more functionality and customization being added every day to cloud computing environments, mainly due to the increased competition among the vendors, the big question that arises is whether or not your company will profit from the cloud computing software?
If you choose to look over the advantages offered, they are numerous. Whether your organization is big or small, cloud computing has many promises for you. Smaller companies can use cloud computing and enjoy benefits like high level security and backup. Large companies on the other hand, can make more strategic decisions regarding their workload and free up their IT resources to do more useful tasks rather than maintaining the infrastructure. Cloud computing provides many options, wherein either you can migrate existing solutions to a cloud environment, to reduce cost or you can work out an entirely new business model and work at a higher speed and reduced cost.
Talking of flexibility, cloud computing easily handles the computing and storage needs. It enables manufacturers to run large simulations for product development and there is no need to invest in physical resources needed for testing. The biggest benefit of cloud system is the long-term savings. Although migrating the business model to a cloud system involves quite some money and resources at the beginning, but the investment gets completely justified by lower staffing costs, lower licensing cost and reducing the equipment usage and power consumption by the on-site servers.
Apart from the numerous benefits, cloud computing has some drawbacks. The main issue that the companies have is security concerns for mission critical applications. Also, there are security and compliance concerns for the public cloud. While many of these grievances are being addressed by the vendors, the advantages offered far outweigh the drawbacks. Security issues in the public cloud, involving mission critical applications can always be removed by switching to a private cloud system, which is similar to the on-site IT department as the controls remains in-house. The only difference and the advantage is that there is no need to dedicate servers, storage and computing units and networks to a particular application.
Considering so many benefits of the cloud computing, it is no surprise that most manufacturers are investing in this sector. The cloud computing can either be public or private. Private cloud computing, as mentioned earlier is similar to in-house IT department with the benefits of cloud. Public cloud, on the other hand gives the controls of the software and the data to the third-party vendor. And then there is the hybrid cloud, which comprises the features of both the public and private cloud and as experts say, “is the future of cloud computing”.
