Change Your Business Management With Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has made a huge impact on the way we manage our data and business process. But how will it change our management in the future? Let’s take a closer look here!

Introduction

Business management is always associated with the emergence of new technologies. Over the last decade, cloud computing has grown to be the most impactful innovation that requires enterprises to keep an eye on. But many people still have the same question: how can cloud computing change the way we manage things? In general, the alteration in management is all about the way information is collected.

Organizations are changing rapidly

Since the invention of the cloud, information can travel much faster across the computing systems which are far more flexible with several aspects like virtualization, automated security patching or scaling up to handle larger workloads. This will probably lead to a more supple work structure considering the aim to create products and service that can be adjusted to satisfy customer’s needs. The key here is data collection and analysis, as well as some changes in product software.

Enterprises are on the shift to the cloud

Moreover, a potential outcome of businesses migrating to the cloud is the change in how products are designed. The IT department would have more contact and collaboration with other units such as the sales, marketing, and finance. Customer interaction might also be improved significantly. For example, Chris Jackson, the Head of Cloud Platform department at the global learning company Pearson, claimed that his IT team had involved more on product design meetings to offer some advice on how the data should be collected, instead of just launching the software and doing the maintenance work as previously.

Public cloud-based services like AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud are regarded as cheaper but effective providers of data storage and process by many people. And the low cost might be the main reason why companies leave behind their data centers and consume attendant software. Others use cloud computing in their own data centers for faster working speed and increasing resources.

How cloud computing affects product design and customer

In general, the cloud has made it easier for companies to design the products or service directly on the cloud, as well as conduct better marketing campaigns. Businesses also prefer to use the cloud for new data storage and analysis. It is a common place where many AI operations are conducted like image and speech recognition.

As businesses start to recognize their products and services as software-centric, the data is repeatedly extracted from those entities. Adjustments and updates become a must in the constant process. Other organizational functions no long played a crucial role as the business processes become iterative.
Recently, there has been a project on a tablet-based system for conducting complex calculations in real time. It would take the developers at least six months to complete. But thanks to cloud computing technology that allows accelerated testing and direct communication with their customers, the product was created just after 10 weeks based on their specific demands about the construction and design.

What else can change?

It is not surprising to mention the constant relationship between business management and technology. But when will the cloud have the huge influence on management like mainframe or client-server? According to recent research by Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock, and Chad Syverson, it is suggested that major technology breakthrough may lead to a lag in productivity for many years. The reason for that statement is that we must build a new ecosystem for that innovative technology to grow, as well as think about how we should utilize for maximum efficiency. In fact, advances like the AI or the cloud-based software are believed to find their position in human life quickly. Low cost is probably one of the main reasons why they can be applied to real-life problems by young startups.

The migration to “cloud native” organizations

Cloud native software emphasizes the easy-to-use feature and that the alteration of application components has a low effect. The whole applications are divided into “micro-services,” which can be adjusted with little to no impact on the software.

The conventional software often requires big rewrites when people want to make a change because they have a series of “dependencies,” the relationships among different lines of code. If we change those micro-services into highly portable units called containers, the relationship is no longer a problem. This change allows developers to manage the applications from any place all over the world without troubles.

Kubernetes is one of the most popular cloud-native platforms that offers globally apps management. 

Kubernetes is the most famous company that was developed by Google to help the parent company run global applications, adjust products with ease and fix software issues at a great scale. Kubernetes has been largely used by a variety of organizations and received positive feedback. Michael Francis, the Blackrock project leader, said that Kubernates allows them to manage thousands of processes transparently and solve problems more quickly. The online education company Pearson also uses Kubernetes for deploying and managing their new types of online learning systems in Mexico and India.

Conclusion

The immense growth of cloud computing has led to significant changes in business management and the organizations themselves. The IT teams have the opportunity to involve more in the product lifecycle and deserve a place in every meeting about the product design, where they can give valuable advice on how the data should be collected and analyzed to meet customers’ need. Managers will need to focus more on improving their skills including collaboration, learning, and empathy to make the organization more adaptive to new challenges.