the Awesome Highlighter

While the McKinsey study only considered the hardware cost savings of the cloud, there is tremendous customer benefit in all of these areas.   remove

In the virtualization approach of private data centers, a company takes a server and subdivides it into many servers to increase efficiency. We do the opposite by taking a large set of low cost commodity systems and tying them together into one large supercomputer. We strip down our servers to the bare essentials, so that we're not paying for components that we don't need. For example, we produce servers without video graphics chips that aren't needed in this environment.   remove

By building the reliability into the software, we're able to use a much lower cost hardware platform but still maintain the same reliability to customers.   remove

we operate at scale, and that drives economies of scale.   remove

The reality is that most businesses don't gain a competitive advantage from maintaining their own data centers.   remove

While the cost advantages of cloud computing can be great, there's another advantage that in many ways is more important: the rapid pace of innovation.   remove

The era of delayed gratification is over – the Internet allows innovations to be delivered as a constant flow that incorporates user needs, offers faster cycles for IT, and enables integration with systems that were not previously possible. This makes major upgrades a thing of the past, and gives the customer greater and greater value for their money.   remove

For example, if a company wanted to implement a typical three tier system in the cloud using virtualization, they would have to build, install, and maintain software to run the database, app server, and web server. This would require them to spend time and money to acquire the licenses, maintain system uptime, and implement patches.   remove

As companies weigh private data centers vs. scalable clouds, they should ask a simple question: can I find the same economics, ease of maintenance, and pace of innovation that is inherent in the cloud?   remove