New technology appears every time and always be gearing towards enhancement.

Cloud Computing is the new trend in the IT industry.
What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. A cloud service has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional hosting. It is sold on demand, typically by the minute or the hour; it is elastic — a user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time; and the service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing but a personal computer and Internet access). Significant innovations in virtualization and distributed computing, as well as improved access to high-speed Internet and a weak economy, have accelerated interest in cloud computing.

Clients will subscribe to the hosting service, thus reducing the capital investment.

If the trend is moving toward this direction, in fact, it IS right now.

There will be 2 angles at looking this technology.

From Business point of view,

• Companies need not to engage much manpower to maintain the hardware, (especially the in-house team). Fewer manpower is required. Most of the services are hosted in the service provider.
• It is a reduced expenditure on capital assets. The company will have little hardware to take care. Pay the hosted service and the business is on.
• Justifiable to management that it is an Operating expense rather than Capital expense. Companies will need not to or reduced stress over the depreciation cost, maintenance cost, number of license count and so forth.
• Company IT infrastructure are simpler, just direct , sufficient access to the service provider and need not worry about the equipment hats needs to invest.

From employees perspective

• Many people will soon be out of employment, lesser manpower is required, because of the in-house works / efforts are outsourced to service provider
• Lesser job opportunities are available in the company. Older workers will have to upgrade themselves in order to stay relevant in the job

Lessons Learned:

When technology automates, it does ease everyone by not capturing anything manual and even a manpower reduction.

The downside of it is, there will be a trade-off for manpower. Most of the services are outsourced to service providers. Thus, the unemployment rate will rise. Older staffs will need to upgrade themselves academically or technically in order to stay relevant in the job.

Looking at the other side, there is no requirement for more headcounts to service the internal assets.

With human around, there is always some kind of negativeness, such as low productivity, efficiency, performance and so forth.

How are you going to measure a person’s productivity, efficiency or other means. There are also intangible benefits like well versed process & procedures, internal security etc.