Week 3 - Outsourcing or Cloud?

Greetings Cloud Computing Bloggers!!

Welcome to another week of my Cloud Computing and Governance Blog to track my learning as I take this journey with all of you.

This week our reading within the course book is the topic of Traditional Outsourcing or Cloud Computing solutions for an organization.  In essence a Traditional Outsourcing is taking what a company is doing and paying for another company to do it.  The most common example of outsourcing is that a company has a product that they offer to its customers, but they cannot afford the manpower to run the Help Desk/Call Center.  This is service that the company could outsource to another organization that specializes in it.  The downside is that this is usually along term contract that the organization must commit to and could be very expensive through the course of the contract.

Secondly, the Cloud Computing solution is as we discussed the last couple weeks.  When this solution is selected, the company can be certain that they are only paying for what they are using.  Unlike the Outsourcing solution that will pay for their Help Desk whether they are getting high numbers of phone calls or not.  With Cloud, if you wanted to decrease the amount of storage space or computing power, it is as easy as a phone call and the changes are instantaneous and your savings can be seen immediately.  The same goes for if your organization goes through a rapid expansion, you can all and ask for more processing and storage and it will be immediate.  With Outsourcing, if you went through this expansion but are under contract, you more than likely would not be able to expand the aforementioned Help Desk until that contract expires or re-enter contract negotiations would cost you even more.

Overall I think that both solutions can be utilized efficiently.  Outsourcing, in my opinion, is more for well off companies that cannot sacrifice the money they put into their own data center.  Cloud is for smaller companies that do not already have the financial obligation of their own data center.

That is all I have today everyone!! I hope you learned something! I did!!

Until next week!