Impact of Cloud Platforms

There are lots of ways to think about the impact of cloud platforms. For startup companies, this has been transformative. Now it is much cheaper and much easier to do a technology-based startup because you can use public cloud platforms rather than buy your own hardware. This is a big win, even for enterprise IT, cloud platforms are having a huge impact.
Here’s one way to think about that. Traditionally, the enterprise IT default platform looked like this. The clients were PCs and laptops. Everyone had their own internal data center infrastructure with servers, and operating systems, and databases, and so on. On top of that, organizations run packaged applications like SAP, and SharePoint, and whatever, and their own custom apps.
This was the default enterprise world for decades. In the world of cloud though, these changes. First, as we all know, the clients have changed. PCs and laptops still matter, but so do mobile devices, like tablets and phones and the server-side is changing radically for most of the organizations. Now whenever possible, organizations are choosing to use SaaS rather than on-premises applications. More and more, on-premises packaged apps are being replaced by apps in the cloud. Similarly, custom applications that were once written on an organization’s own internal infrastructure are now built on cloud platforms.
Cloud platforms are the new foundation for competitive advantage. Because an app you can purchase, whether it’s an on-premises packaged app or a SaaS app, can be bought by your competitors as well. No real advantage is usually possible here. The real advantage comes from custom applications that you build yourself that do unique things. That is what gives you a competitive advantage, and that is now the main focus of cloud platforms. That’s where you’ll now build your custom apps. The choice your organization makes is very important. The main points of this module are these. Cloud platforms have pros and cons like everything. In a majority of situations though, you should expect the pros to outweigh the cons. And the leaders in this market today are clear, Amazon and Microsoft with Google may be a little behind, and in low code platforms, Salesforce. Finally, the big truth, cloud platforms are becoming the default for new custom applications.