Vanson Bourne's Business Impact of the Cloud

Cloud computing is being adopted worldwide by a lot of organizations. Cloud computing is a technology whereby computing is delivered as a service over the internet. This means that the data and application do not need to be specifically located on the user’s machine or on the company’s local servers in fact the data and applications are located on a cloud computing vendor’s server estate and is then delivered to the enterprise a or when it is required. It allows the member of the organization to access the data from any internet-connected device.

There are a lot of benefits of this system. One of the biggest is perhaps the fact that cloud computing only asks for the payment of the server and infrastructure capacity as needed. The company’s technological infrastructure is outsources which allows the IT department to spend its energy on strategic activities and innovation.

This research will analyze the emergence of cloud computing from the viewpoint of finance function of enterprises. The CFOs and other decision makers within the finance department have to find out the most efficient and cost effective ways to keep the organization running and therefore, having a properly executed cloud computing strategy can have significant benefits for the organization. Since decisions makers within the finance function look for efficiency saving and business benefits, it is important to know their take on cloud computing.

The key findings of the research are:

• Finance decision maker have a very high awareness of the cloud computing. The majority firmly believe that cloud computing brings a lot of business benefits like increased flexibility, capacity as well as scalability. 88% of the respondents are similar with cloud computing to some extent while the rest claim they are fully familiar with could computing technology.
• Most of businesses are adopting cloud computing. 33% of the researched have adopted the cloud computing while 29% are making plans for it. More than 80% of financial decision makers are awake of their organization’s plans to adopt cloud computing while others are involved in the discussion to adopt it or not in the respective organizations.
• Financial decision makers think that cloud computing such as Google Apps for Business offers quantifiable business benefits. The majority of respondents believe that all listed traits of cloud computing - such as the availability of latest versions of application everywhere, cost reduction and increased flexibility- can offer a lot of benefits to the company. These benefits are thought to be quantifiable benefits like reduced IT maintenance costs, reduced IT spend and operations costs and improve efficiency that can lead to success of the business. Cloud computing also offers better value to the company than the traditional outsourcing.
• Cloud computing enables the IT department to contribute to the business much more. It increases the IT department’s ability to innovate more corporate strategies. 41% of respondents believe that cloud computing will make CFO more influential in managing IT services.