Cloud and collaboration. The perfect setting for an entrepreneur.

What is the primary advantage of the cloud?

Why do people use it?

When there is such a big question of privacy of data attached to its usage, why more and more people are getting on it?

 

These were the questions that came to my mind, an economics major, when I sat down to find and write something on it.

While reading up the available content online, a more specific question stemmed up from our last lecture about how Jetlore uses cloud and how it helped the founders create something valuable. The questions, which were the same as before just targeted the community of entrepreneurs this time around. 

My research reaped these results:

As an entrepreneur, you can reduce costs, hence making better business plans to attract VCs(I know it will still be along shot!),you can put in the budget for more innovative practices, research, and development hence creating a chain of benefit not only for yourself and investors but consumers too, but most importantly they can collaborate.

Why did I put collaboration as the most important aspect of cloud computing? Well, because I believe it. And apparently, so does your average organization/startup which uses 214 file sharing and collaboration services today. {Click here for the source}

For some like theconsulting firm CSC, it is even the language of their company! CSC in order to enhance the way how the knowledge is captured and shared among its 90,000 users, it employed Jive, a cloud-based collaboration software maker.

The first step was to start with an experiment to see if people we be willing to work with the software. Turned out, in the end, CSC had more than 25,000 new people who registered for the cloud service, 1,200 new groups and 1,50,000 activities logged per month.

They called this service C3 and deemed it the “de facto standard for how we collaborate.” {Example source}

The benefit of collaboration has additional advantages: {Source}

• You can see data organization improved due to the fact that now one can just update a document at a central location and others can access it without having to create the latest version everytime you need to send it to someone.
• Members/co-founders etc. can participate on an equal pedestal as everyone can participate anytime from anywhere.
• You get real-time updates.
• Ease of uploading large-sized files.

With these benefits along with the cost-effectiveness and its ability to interact across borders with ease, a business of any size can be effectively run these days.

In conclusion, for an entrepreneur, cloud computing offers a perfect setting to build and scale an idea on, and a natural working experience with their team members regardless of if it not being the actual case.

Just to add, after discussing the benefits of cloud computing, a rational person always know to ask about the other side of the coin as well.

I noticed other classmates pitching in about privacy and security issues related to cloud and look forward to going through their opinions on the same.

That said, I would love to hear about what do you think about the specific issues that might not be privacy related, but can come up because of the ease by which people can collaborate over the cloud?