STRATEGIC SIGNIFICANCE OF CLOUD SERVICES

Question: This class was about the strategic significance of cloud services. We’ve looked at how cloud transforms both the tech sector and the industries that rely upon the tech sector. Please identify three distinct aspect of cloud’s strategic significance as presented in the lectures. With reference to the assigned readings and videos, develope these ideas for yourself and present them back in writing. (800 words)

The course is UNDERSTANDING CLOUD SERVICES.

LINKS FOR VIDEOS: https://www.pbs.org/video/gilded-age-chapter-1-2gdqo8/

LINKS FOR ARTICLES: https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/computer/greenbf.htm

Hints to the strategic significance of cloud.

To see strategic significance, you have to look from the top down in all the businesses interacting, you have to see the relationship between Zoom and Amazon Web Services, the relationship between Apple and Amazon Web Services. And then we start to say AWS has something going on because you’re seeing the relationship. So something is strategic significance based on relationships that are put in place in the economy.

KEY POINTS TO STRATEGIC SIGNIFICANCE OF CLOUD.

APPLE CLOUD Business is hugely dependent on Amazon. In April 2019, the story was broken that Apple is one of AWS biggest customers, they pay then 30 million dollars a month for cloud services, 360 million dollars a year. That is the key to strategic significance of cloud, being dependent on others, really big tech players. It is significance because in this emergence set of relationship is the infrastructure and the economies of global scale. This is where the global economies lies in these relationship.
This is just few companies that are really successful at operating globally. But if one of them cant operate globally, independently relying on another one, where is the rest of us? It suggest something about the relationship on what it means to be global and scale. Secondly, Apple is huge tech corporation, it does not actually control all of its internal operating infrastructure, so in a way we consider that natural for a non tech company to outsource from other tech companies. But what does it means for major tech companies are also having to outsource capacities from other major companies.

Tensions between business side and IT side: In Amazon internally, the IT side runs the business side. Amazon pays to grow IT capacity to scale and they scale at the expense of profit making. They fund IT to grow, they pay to make IT bigger and bigger while Managers think they can always do it cheaper through bargaining or negotiation.

Every week, we looked at companies dominated part of tech business.
1) Who dominated the mainframe business? IBM
2) Who started user friendly use of mass market personal computers? APPLE
3) Who started PC making software as a business? MICROSOFT
4) Who dominated search? GOOGLE
5) Who stared and dominated cloud? AMAZON

If you’re thinking of what AMAZON does, you interact it with it!

STRATEGIC SIGNIFICANCE OF CLOUD. Jottings from class

Abstraction: Cloud abstracts! Be more specific
Cloud abstracts white collar workers
Cloud abstracts business industries, (you start to make claims about how it positions)

1) Abstraction: Cloud introduces the abstraction in a new form of labour. Cloud is significant because it introduces for the first time the possibility of abstracting a group of workers who were not abstracted. Abstraction of infrastructure will reduce the cost of rent for a service being rendered in an office. For example, due to the Covid 19, a lot of businesses and office are now closed. People are being encouraged to work from home, if situation persist, majority might not longer see reasons to pay rent for office space for some kind of services. This might lead to shift of power from physical world to online.

2) Cloud is making other companies dependent on their services by taking over the operational control from them.

3) Automation: Companies are getting data and automating it. Cloud services can automate the other layers of cloud computing to reduce cost. They were automating managerial jobs. The automation is process oriented and the knowledge disappears, the skills becomes irrelevant. So its not like we don’t need a Manager. For example, one skill like analyzing balance sheet might be automated. Applying automation in organizations can save money and also make up the money they’ve paid for automation for getting these services. Automation is significant because of the money that businesses can save eventually.

Please develop these ideas into a bigger picture in relation to the assigned articles, links, and videos.

Note; don’t go outside the course materials, it will not help. The tutor is really tough and wants us to focus of the materials provided in class.
The hints will give you an idea of what the strategic significance is all about and make your work faster after reading those materials. All the attached articles are relevant, there is a particular file attached about ABSTRACTION. It can help in developing one of the points about the strategic significance.