Every enterprise can be broken down in roughly two layers in terms of business activities. The first one constitutes their primary process, which is the delivery of their specific products or services. The second layer comprises all activities that directly or indirectly support this primary process. This last category is not the core business of the enterprise. In fact, there are companies who have made these activities their core business. And so, as an enterprise, you can leave these activities to those companies. This is called sourcing.

Many of the companies that offer these supporting activities can be found on the internet – commonly referred to as “the cloud”. So now we roughly have an idea of what cloud computing is. The potential of cloud computing is enormous. Just imagine that you could take advantage of professional software like Photoshop on a pay per use basis - but we have not reached that point yet. Even today however, it is possible to run a large portion of your business in the cloud, where the options include but are not limited to:

• Collaborate in virtual offices, share documents and stage meetings;
• Use online applications (software as a service) to support Customer Relationship Management (CRM), financial administration and accounting, Human Resource Management, Facility Management etc.
• Leave processes like payroll and employee absence monitoring completely to third parties.

Making use of cloud computing can significantly cut costs. There are however two drawbacks to the concept. The first one is that if someone makes extensive use of cloud computing, it will become a nuisance to keep track of all the different user accounts. What you would want here is a supporting service for identity and access management, also referred to as a trust broker. The second drawback has to do with propagation of data. A simple example: after a newly hired employee is registered in the HRM system, this employee should receive salary during the next payroll run, the employee should also be registered for the pension plan and moreover, be provisioned for the applications that he or she will need to use. Entering the same information over and over is a tedious task. Here you would need a link and propagation mechanism powered by a Cloud Service Bus.

Domus Technica is convinced that taking of these drawbacks will make cloud computing a huge success. It is for this reason that we are investigating solutions in this area with a number of partners. If you are interested in joining this discussion, please contact us.