Well first up, what is a Cloud? Cloud computing, according to Wikipedia is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Simply put you shift your apps outside the firewall to the WWW. Moving your LMS or other e-Learning tools to the Internet is a big (sometimes scary) decision but one I consider worth discussing or at least investigating. Why? Well Amazon, Google, Microsoft all have major plans to offer more and more of their services in the Cloud. You could ignore this growing trend. Or dig a bit deeper. Here are the benefits I feel it brings:
- One of the primary benefits of cloud computing is the speed at which people can procure services, allowing people to bypass traditional IT departments altogether.
- Major cost reductions. No big upfront capital expenditure for hardware, software licenses and implementation services. No ongoing maintenance costs for upgrades and patches, etc.
- Fast to implement - ready NOW
- Reliability and Fault-Tolerance. Cloud environments take advantage of the built-in redundancy of the large numbers of servers that make them up by enabling high levels of availability and reliability for applications that can take advantage of this.
- Web based systems have much more capacity for growth and increased functionality
- Utility-based. Users only pay for the services they use, either by subscription or transaction-based models.
- It can be accessed any time, anywhere where there is a Web browser and Internet connection
- Offering (non-sensitive) Training as an On-Demand Internet service is low risk (from a security perspective) compared to data sensitive applications
Gartner predicts that by 2012, 80 percent of Fortune 1000 enterprises will be paying for some cloud computing services. So some interesting food for thought. (Oh by the way this blog is in the Cloud. But you knew that, right?)
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