Companies Increasingly Turning to Cloud Computing for Flexibility, Scalability and Cost Efficiencies

When Nationwide Children’s Hospital looks for ways to provide better collaboration among doctors and researchers or enhanced communication between physicians and patients, it is increasingly looking to the cloud for solutions– cloud computing that is.  In a recent TV interview on ONN, Nationwide Children’s CTO, Brian Shea, shared that the institution has begun implementing cloud functionality for some of the organization’s basic IT services.  Although he says it’s still early within the lifecycle of the program he can already see how relying on the cloud can allow for flexibility, rapid scalability and deployment and cost efficiencies over traditional on-premise solutions.  Shea says that if all goes well, he envisions within a year that many more of the organization’s IT needs may be met by cloud computing.

“But, moving to the cloud can be scary,” says Shea.  “Placing your data in the cloud doesn’t take away your responsibility for securing it,” he says. 

Ron Savoia, managing director of Status Innovations Group, agrees and says security is one of the largest concerns of companies considering moving to the cloud.  But he also says that providers are becoming more and more adept at securing data as evidenced by the prevailing migration of federal and state governments to the cloud.  And by serving such large customers, Savoia says that solution providers can provide economies of scale which are helping drive down costs and make cloud computing even more cost effective for organizations of all size.

For companies who are deploying cloud solutions, there are also ways to test these solutions before implementation.  Steve Gruetter, director of Platform Lab says many companies want to leverage the cloud to improve IT operations, but they’re looking for ways to test the cloud model to see if it will work properly within the context of their operations.  For that purpose, they are turning to Platform Lab as a flexible, affordable and efficient way of testing in a private cloud before going live.

To learn more about the benefits and considerations of cloud computing, you can watch the ONN broadcast.  Go to the link below, and click on Ohio Means Business.  From  there, select Cloud Computing to view the video. 

http://www.10tv.com/live/content/video/onn.html