From the course: Digital Transformation Tips

Making data and systems accessible via the cloud

From the course: Digital Transformation Tips

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Making data and systems accessible via the cloud

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- [Instructor] Obviously, one of the key enablers of digital transformation, is making sure that your information is available digitally. In part, that means taking those old rooms and rooms of filing cabinets, and getting the records contained, converted into electronic formats, that can be used with modern systems. But how they're going to be used, and where they're going to be stored are also very important parts of the equation. At the beginning of this century, even though a lot of businesses had digitized their internal systems, they were still just that, internal. Data was stored in-house on dedicated computers. If you wanted to use that information, you still had to walk through the front door and sit yourself down at a workstation to do it. But as Internet adoption grew and machine capabilities improved, people started to think that maybe there was a better way of doing things. The origin of the Cloud as a concept is debatable. But the first time it really entered the collective consciousness, was in August 2006, when Eric Schmidt, who was the CEO of Google at the time, introduced the term at an industry conference. The original concept was simple, rather than storing information physically, why not store it online? Fast forward to today. What we have now, are multiple distributed networks of computers, located worldwide. Storage is virtual rather than physical, which is less expensive, simpler to maintain, and much more flexible. You can add or reduce storage instantly according to need. But it's not just storage anymore. There's a lot more things that you can do in the Cloud these days. Now I'm not going to go into super great depth on this, but some of the stuff available to you, there's software as a service or SaaS, which is using applications that live online instead of on individual user computers. Things like Office 365, Google Suite and Salesforce, these are great examples of this. They make it easier and cheaper to get employees up and running, since there's a lot less setup that IT departments need to do. There's also platform as a service or PaaS. This concept is still evolving, but generally you can think of PaaS, as providing developmental tools and environments online, so that developers have a common area to work in. One of the biggest advantages to working in the Cloud, is that it makes data and systems available from any device connected to the Internet, which creates more opportunities for a remote workforce. And there's some concerns around security. It's not enough to secure your own system, when you're dealing with partners online, you're also at risk to attacks on their systems. Doing your homework and dealing with solid companies can go a long way towards mitigating the risk, but it does exist. If you'd like more information about how the Cloud is affecting business, you might want to search for courses on cloud computing in the online course library.

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