Excerpt from an article in the April 2011 edition of CFO Magazine.
Will cloud computing save you money? There is broad consensus that cloud computing will save money. But, Bruce Schuman, group controller for IT at Intel adds that, "while Intel has saved tens of millions of dollars, the prime motivation was not just about cost but also about flexibility and agility."
Before the cloud, Schuman says,"an internal customer would come to us and say, We need support for a new application. And it would take us three months to load the application on a server, test it, and then add security. That's pretty horrible customer service. Now, with our private cloud, in some cases we can do it in less than three hours."
A recent Booze Allen Hamilton report,"The Economics of Cloud Computing," estimated that over a 13-year life cycle (3 years to prepare, 10 years of operations), the cost of implementing and sustaining a cloud environment may be as much as two-thirds lower than maintaining a traditional nonvirtualized IT data center."
What is cloud computing? The "Cloud" simply describes a system for accessing computing capabilities at a distance via the internet.