Cloudsourcing – Bring Cirrus down

By Pradeep Pavaluru

Cirrus is a type of cloud found high above in the troposphere. In IT, since the cloud technology providers are growing at a fast rate, there is a need to introduce a complete ecosystem in a cost-effective and secure way to all the businesses. It will help SMBs, ISVs, large organizations and enterprises to gradually consider their businesses to align to this futuristic technology. You might have heard or talked about a few of the terminologies like outsourcing, crowdsourcing, etc.

Cloudsourcing is one such technology that is making a shift in the way IT organizations work, manage, create and communicate. Organizations are now looking for a cool, cost-effective way to achieve their goals, as Cloudsourcing has the potential to power their processes.

What is Cloudsourcing?

Cloudsourcing is a technique or process wherein the organizations pay the vendors or providers to manage or provide services to their IT ecosystems from the cloud space, which reduces maintenance and deployment efforts in a cost effective manner.

With big data, Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud being the latest trends in technology, there is an ever rising demand for higher storage capacity and faster computation speed. As data is flooding and bursting the capacities of their on-premises set-ups, all the players in the IT and the non-IT fields want to move to the cloud. When all the businesses opt for moving to the cloud, then the following factors will improve and offer plenty of benefits for you and your organization such as:

Financial:

• Lower people and power costs – reduces the overall workforce cost and power usage cost by your servers. 
• No capital costs – no need to invest huge amount on procuring servers.

Accessibility:

•  High bandwidth – based on the requirements, switching to higher bandwidth is easier.
•  Disaster Recovery (DR) plans – the outsourcing vendors will have all the mitigation and DR plans for your systems to run 24x7.
• Work from anywhere, anytime and on any device – you can always stay connected.

Expansion:

• On-demand computing for agility and flexibility – you can increase your computing power, storage and capacity whenever required by your business and as per your request.
• Pay-per-use – you pay only for what you use.
• Focus only on business – you can focus on your business goals rather than on IT.

Security & Compliance:

• Same security capability like on-premises – you do not have to worry about the security, as there are quite a few services available for providing advanced security for your systems and business. 
• High performance and anytime support – your systems’ overall performance will be improved and anytime support will be provided to address your issues.

Business:

• Easier management – uncomplicated management and hassle-free decision-making. 
• More business and go-green factor – with less overhead on IT, you can invest more on building your organization’s value and client base as well as contribute to a greener work place.

Some well-known companies have already moved into this space. One such example is Netflix, a movie streaming giant. It has benefited in a lot of ways, especially on the scalability aspect. Netflix has a huge customer base and was unable conduct business in the traditional data center way. That is when they looked into cloud as one of their game changing technology.

Future Trends: 

For the next few years, the focus is clearly on the cloud space. All organizations – small, medium and large – will have to create plans to model and execute. I am sure that the vendors supporting the cloudsourcing technology will also increase, each with a unique competitive edge. The big players have already invested heavily to support the growing businesses and trends in this space. 

SPAN is also eyeing for a piece of this cloud-war and has started building competencies in this field. Let us put our thoughts and focus on it for a brighter and cloud-enabled world.