Orange Information Systems Group - A paper on how cloud technologies increase business agility.

Business Agility and the Cloud

In the 1950s almost no organization owned a computer. Computing was consumed as a service rather than owned as a capital asset.

Computer companies provided services in those days because the computers themselves were too expensive for most organisations to own. But we also have to think of the risk associated with the acquisition of such an expensive resource. In the ‘50s, computers were new-fangled gadgets and nobody really knew if there’d be any advantage to using them: they were “scientific” devices. How could science apply to a haulage business or an insurance company?

However, their use grew. Organisations outsourced their calculation problems from teams of people who took days, weeks or months to come up with an answer, to computer companies, for whom the greatest delay was the delivery of the program and the delivery of its results.

This extra speed gave these companies business agility. It meant they could respond more quickly to events than their competitors and could either contain profitability or improve it and often take market share.

We find ourselves in a similar position today. Large computer companies with masses of compute resources and storage capacity are offering immensely scalable compute services on a pay-as-you-go and only-pay-for-what-you-use model . We send our computer programs to them and they run them for us.

• Business Agility and the Cloud (PDF, 631KB)