1. Downtime virtually non-existent – Since the cloud infrastructure consists of many servers, even if some of the servers go down, the business application can continue to work on any one of the other servers. This also means that cloud computing can be an integral part of a company’s disaster recovery strategy.
2. Increased capacity to scale – Since resources can be acquired dynamically at run-time the capacity to scale becomes almost instantaneous provided all the solution components are on the cloud.
3. Infrastructure completely outsourced – Since most cloud environments are provided by third parties, there is no need to manage the infrastructure. The nominal monthly pay-per-use fee takes care of the infrastructure support .

 Besides these obvious benefits, the one area where there is a great deal of uncertainty is around data security and privacy.

 Overall cloud computing should be seriously considered for any application that is looking to leverage the advantages cited above.

 Some big players offering cloud-computing services – Amazon.com, Google, Microsoft, and IBM.

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There are three key hurdles that corporations have to overcome in order to build sustainable and effective social communities and they are: 

• Employees’ Willingness to Share: In a corporate setting, employees are less willing to openly share their thoughts.  Additionally, The culture of sharing and engaging with others in the organization maybe absent. This hurdle can be overcome by providing a channel to be anonymous (if employees choose to) and incentivizing employees to contribute.  Additionally, organizations need a clear journey management strategy to inculcate this behavior as part of the organization’s culture. This is key.
• Knowing What to Share and What Not to Share: In most cases, even if employees’ were willing to share information, there is not a clear distinction of what one can/cannot share.  As part of the journey management strategy described above, policies need to be reiterated and employees need clear and easy guides to decide what can and cannot be shared.
• Unstructured Outcomes: Growth patterns and use of social networks are hard to predict.  If the primary intent of the organization is to promote open and effective communication this maybe achieved easier than say if the organization was planning on using the employee generated data (EGD) to evaluate performance.

Related posts:

1. Cisco’s Foray into Enterprise Social Networking