White Paper: Cloud Computing: Marketing Hype Or Sound Business Strategy?

Building a house is difficult and costly. That's why a family with two children would most likely not request a house with eight bedrooms "just in case." And rarely are homes built with three dining rooms and an extra kitchen just to handle the annual holiday get-together. These spaces would sit underutilized for most of the year, and the time and costs associated with them would not fit most budgets.

Building an enterprise infrastructure can be equally challenging and costly. Yet most business infrastructures are intentionally overbuilt, as IT routinely deploys extra server capacity that sits unused for 10 months out of the year. Why the precaution? Because most companies have been burned at one time or another by the crashed websites and unavailable applications that result from unplanned usage spikes. From a service perspective, this overbuilding makes sense. From a business perspective, it's crazy.

What if there were a better way? What if you could build an infrastructure for your critical-business applications and data with the flexibility to add and subtract capacity as needed? What if you could create a foundation that adapts to your business without breaking your budget? Cloud computing offers the potential to solve these challenges.