Cloud compute environments (often called CloudCenters) are great for SMBs that may not have large capital budgets to purchase hardware and/or may lack IT staff to manage hardware. These companies can greatly reduce and control their costs by deploying IT infrastructure within CloudCenters.
SteelEye's products attach a tangible benefit to cloud computing by delivering low-cost, easily deployed business continuity services to organizations of all sizes. Our data replication products can be used in the cloud as a more complete and comprehensive backup approach. This approach can be extended into a server migration tool that transfers production server images into the cloud. It can even be applied as an in-cloud disaster recovery service for servers that have been migrated.
A company may use the cloud to host its Web services, e-mail and e-commerce as well as to access applications that can be customized to meet the specific requirements of internal and external stakeholders. An application example is Salesforce.com, which provides a platform for sales force automation that can be completely customized to satisfy the sales operations requirements of the organization. This eliminates the costs of licensing and building a custom application for the organization, custom training of individuals in the organization to learn how to use the application properly, procuring the additional hardware and hiring the resources to manage the IT infrastructure.
New companies that are looking for ways to minimize their start-up costs will find the cloud to be a cost-effective alternative to hosting IT infrastructure in their own data center. More established companies that have data centers will see the value in using cloud services for real-time backups of critical IT operations as well as for off-site data replication and disaster recovery processes that replace tape-based backups. This could be a first step towards offloading some of their internal infrastructure to the cloud to, again, minimize the Capex of supporting these assets internally.
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