What Is Cloud Computing?

What is cloud computing? Everyone in the technology world is talking about it… and a lot of people in the business world are asking the same question, “What is cloud computing, and what does it mean for my business?”

Cloud computing platforms are growing in popularity, but why? What unique advantages does a cloud computing architecture offer to companies in today’s economic climate? And what just what is cloud computing, anyway?” Let’s explore the cloud computing infrastructure and its impact on critically important areas to IT, like security, infrastructure investments, business application development, and more.

Most IT departments are forced to spend a significant portion of their time on frustrating implementation, maintenance, and upgrade projects that too often don’t add significant value to the company’s bottom line. Increasingly, IT teams are turning to cloud computing technology to minimize the time spent on lower-value activities and allow IT to focus on strategic activities with greater impact on the business.

The fundamental cloud computing infrastructure has won over the CIOs of some of the world’s largest organizations—these once-skeptical executives never looked back after experiencing first-hand the host of benefits delivered by cloud computing technology.

Proven Web-services integration. By their very nature, cloud computing technology is much easier and quicker to integrate with your other enterprise applications (both traditional software and cloud computing infrastructure-based), whether third-party or homegrown.

World-class service delivery: Cloud computing infrastructures offer much greater scalability, complete disaster recovery, and impressive uptime numbers.

• No hardware or software to install: a 100% cloud computing infrastructure.
• The beauty of cloud computing technology is its simplicity… and in the fact that it requires significantly fewer capital expenditures to get up and running.
• Faster and lower-risk deployment. You can get up and running in a fraction of the time with a cloud computing infrastructure.
• No more waiting months or years and spending millions of dollars before anyone gets to log into your new solution.
• Your cloud computing technology applications are live in a matter of weeks or months, even with extensive customization or integration.

Support for deep customizations. Some IT professionals mistakenly think that cloud computing technology is difficult or impossible to customize extensively, and therefore is not a good choice for complex enterprises. The cloud computing infrastructure not only allows deep customization and application configuration, it preserves all those customizations even during upgrades. And even better, cloud computing technology is ideal for application development to support your organization’s evolving needs.

Empowered business users. Cloud computing technology allows on-the-fly, point-and-click customization and report generation for business users, so IT doesn’t spend half its time making minor changes and running reports.

Automatic upgrades that don’t impact IT resources. Cloud computing infrastructures put an end to a huge IT dilemma: If we upgrade to the latest-and-greatest version of the application, we’ll be forced to spend time and resources (that we don’t have) to rebuild our customizations and integrations. Cloud computing technology doesn’t force you to decide between upgrading and preserving all your hard work, because those customizations and integrations are automatically preserved during an upgrade.

Pre-built, pre-integrated apps for cloud computing technology. The Force.com AppExchange features hundreds of applications built for cloud computing infrastructure, pre-integrated with your Salesforce CRM application or your other application development work on Force.com.

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Overview:

In today's challenging business environment, it is imperative that IT leaders find solutions that can help with lowering capital expenses, driving cost down and yet improve IT effectiveness. Cloud computing represents an incredible business opportunity. However, it also means a significant makeover of your current IT department, operations, resources, IT infrastructure, datacenter and programming models. Through business expansion, contraction, spinoffs, mergers and acquisitions, your IT environment has become increasingly complex. This complexity drives up cost and lowers productivity, seriously impacts business competitiveness.

Savvy IT leaders are turning to the "cloud" to solve of their IT complexities. The cloud offers opportunities to leverage new productivity-enhancing applications quickly, lower ownership costs by moving CapX to OpX, manage operational risk, and better allocate internal IT resources.

As a result, many companies are working with Emalgam to plan or initiate IT department efficiency, consolidation, and/or strategies. The next step is to address the root of the initial problem by establishing a more flexible, elastic, and responsive IT systems — one of the strategies is to move to cloud computing applications.

Emalgam can help you Navigate through the Cloud Hype
If you want to meet your IT challenges by leveraging the benefits of cloud computing services, Emalgam is the best place to start. With more than 10 years of hands-on experience in IT outsourcing and innovation, Emalgam understands how to assess your needs, from both a business and technological perspective. Emalgam offers an array of services through its Cost Optimization practices that will help you assess, optimize, and consolidate your IT resources. You will then be able to make the move through a realistic assessment to see how Cloud Computing System can meet your requirements for today, tomorrow, and beyond. Our services include:
Evaluate the different cloud models available
Unbiased approach to selecting the best cloud strategy
Learn the best way to test/prototype cloud within your organization
Assess the risks of moving data and applications outside of your organization
Achieve greater level of organization agility

Cloud Strategic Planning Service
Emalgam works with your key business and IT stakeholders to understand requirements and identify opportunities to leverage cloud computing to gain a competitive advantage, improve service levels, lower cost, increase revenue, preserve capital, and decrease operating risks. Emalgam helps you identify, evaluate, and plan realistic cloud options - public or private.

Emalgam’s Cloud Strategic Planning Service helps you:

• Build a realistic cloud strategy for your business. We start by understanding your business needs and challenges before we discuss technology or solutions.
• Develop a plan that gives you all of the information required to complete an internal business plan to quickly and cost-effectively implement a cloud strategy.
• Risk vs. reward analyses
• Business readiness analyses (gap analyses) and recommendations
• 24 month cloud roadmap that aligns with your overall IT strategies
• Financial analyses (ROI)
• A set of plans, architectures, and cost estimates as required for budgeting and planning purposes

Managed Services
Emalgam tailors our managed services to meet your requirements and agreed upon goals up front. Our managed solutions can support your business during transformational periods and/or provide administrative services during steady operating state. As your business direction changes, Emalgam can quickly adapt to your business needs.

Learn about our Microsoft Online Managed Services.

Virtualization Modernization Expertise
Moving beyond a modernization of the physical datacenter, we can help you virtualize systems, to reduce the number of systems you need to manage internally, thus increasing asset utilization.

Application Modernization Expertise
We can help you modernize your legacy applications by migrating it to the latest technologies and platforms that can adapt to your changing business needs. We can convert your application into SOA and SaaS based on your individual business drivers. Emalgam has architectural expertise to navigate the planning phases and can deploy the design with implementation and migration services while providing options for future needs. We equip you to support the new systems while retaining the intellectual capital in your current team.

Design, Architecture, and Implementation Services
Emalgam leverages best practices methodology to work with your key business and IT stakeholders to strategize, plan, design, implement and manage the most cost-effective, flexible, safe, and responsive cloud environment for your business. Emalgam has the expertise, tools, and methodologies to help you leverage cloud computing to lower cost, increase revenue, preserve capital expenditure, reallocate resources, and decrease risk.

• Align business and IT goals
• Meet budget and schedule objectives with rapid execution
• Streamlined implementation processes
• Save time and money by implementing your system correctly the first time
• Expedite time to market, enabling rapid scaling and the ability to adjust computing infrastructure to meet changing business demands

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Infrastructure & Value

A Cloud Computing Infrastructure: What’s the Value?

Cloud computing infrastructures and salesforce.com’s Force.com platform have won over the CIOs of some of the world’s largest organizations. These forward-thinking (yet extremely security-conscious) tech executives fully vetted Force.com and realized the value cloud computing technology offers.

Salesforce.com frees companies from traditional software and its hidden costs, high failure rates, unacceptable risks, and protracted implementations. All while providing a comprehensive, flexible platform that meets the needs of businesses of every size, from the world's largest enterprises to small and mid-sized companies everywhere.

Salesforce.com minimizes the risk involved in application development and implementation. After all, technology should solve your business problems, not create more headaches. With salesforce.com and the Force.com cloud computing technology, you'll be free to focus on solving strategic problems instead of worrying about infrastructure requirements, maintenance, and upgrades.
The cloud computing infrastructure also promises significant savings in administrative costs—more than 50 percent in comparison to client/server software.

The areas in which cloud computing saves administrative costs include:

Basic customization. The Force.com cloud computing technology’s point-and-click tools empower administrators and business users to perform basic customizations themselves.

Real-time reporting. Easy wizards step users through report and dashboard creation, so IT’s queue is free of report requests.
Security and sharing models. The sharing model built into the Force.com cloud computing infrastructure protects sensitive data while making the management of security profiles much less time-consuming.

Multiple languages and currencies. Included support for 13 languages and all currencies make managing a global application easier.

No wonder so many CIOs are restructuring their companies around a cloud computing infrastructure.

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Technology & Application

Cloud Computing Technology & Application Development

Cloud computing technology is sparking a huge change in application development circles. Just like the changes that moved publishing technology from paper to bits, making it possible for us to have information about anything in the world right at our fingertips in a flash, the move to a cloud computing infrastructure for application development is making it possible to build robust, enterprise-class applications in a fraction of the time and at a much lower cost.

The Force.com platform ushers in a new era of applications in the cloud that bring the power and success of Salesforce CRM to your whole company—not just sales, service, and marketing. New types of application innovation are now possible through a combination of “no programming” point-and-click wizards, toolkits for the most popular development languages for creating client-side applications, and Apex Code, salesforce.com’s programming language for our Force.com platform. Because the resulting applications will run natively on Force.com, developers gain many advantages.

• Cloud computing technology boasts all the benefits of multitenancy, including built-in security, reliability, upgradeability, and ease of use.
• Out-of-the-box features such as analytics, offline access, and mobile deployment speed application development.
• There’s no need to worry about managing and maintaining any server infrastructure, even as applications scale to thousands of users.
• You can join a community of thousands of developers also focused on business application development for cloud computing infrastructures.
• The Force.com AppExchange marketplace provides an outlet for all your business application development and access to tens of thousands of salesforce.com customers.
• By eliminating the problems of traditional application development, cloud computing technology frees you to focus on developing business applications that deliver true value to your business (or your customers). The Force.com platform lets IT innovate while avoiding the costs and headaches associated with servers, individual software solutions, middleware or point-to-point connections, upgrades—and the staff needed to manage it all.

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Cloud-computing: a better way

Cloud computing is a better way to run your business. Instead of running your apps yourself, they run on a shared data center. When you use any app that runs in the cloud, you just log in, customize it, and start using it. That’s the power of cloud computing.

Businesses are running all kinds of apps in the cloud these days, like CRM, HR, accounting, and custom-built apps. Cloud-based apps can be up and running in a few days, which is unheard of with traditional business software. They cost less, because you don’t need to pay for all the people, products, and facilities to run them. And, it turns out they’re more scalable, more secure, and more reliable than most apps. Plus, upgrades are taken care of for you, so your apps get security and performance enhancements and new features—automatically.

The way you pay for cloud-based apps is also different. Forget about buying servers and software. When your apps run in the cloud, you don’t buy anything. It’s all rolled up into a predictable monthly subscription, so you only pay for what you actually use.

Finally, cloud apps don’t eat up your valuable IT resources, so your CFO will love it. This lets you focus on deploying more apps, new projects, and innovation.

The bottom line: Cloud computing is a simple idea, but it can have a huge impact on your business.

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