Macroenvironment Cloud

Macro environment trends as economic or technology trends affect businesses and products in different ways. I will focus on the environment I am currently working in, which is the delivery of cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems.

The appearance and convergence of especially technological and economical macro-trends has created a need for cost-effective web-based solutions in the delivery of software systems. The new technologies are known as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing. The easy deployment and use of cloud - based systems makes them very user-friendly as well as cost effective and more productive than the old complex system that needed to be archived and stored on the company's servers.

The two trends that influence the cloud based market are Economy and Technology.

Economy: The global financial crisis has forced and is still forcing the company's decision makers to re-evaluate their investment decision and to focus more on the core competencies of the company due to limited resources. Therefore for companies it does not make much sense to invest into data security and the removal of system vulnerabilities because the speed on the developments software, external threats and hence the decreasing specialist power that the existing employees have. At the moment firms are still very reluctant to let an external cloud computing service provider host their data because of the loss of control of their data and because of concerns about the capability of such providers to secure the data against external threats. In my opinion, these concerns are not up to date anymore, because cloud computing providers are probably the most reliable and secure service providers at the moment. Their core business is to service their customers with secure services and therefore they are investing heavily in the best security systems as well as in highly skilled IT security personnel.

Technology: Since the introduction of the Internet to business this technology is since evolving on a very high rate. Nowadays we have very powerful broadband networks and powerful mobile devices which provides the companies with the possibility to work from different place in the world and to exchange information in real time. There are also technologies that allows employees to be in a completely different part of the world and still be able to access the company's network and facilities through an online access.

The trend of companies of working from different locations has been set by these technologies. The cloud computing services are now expanding these capabilities of working remotely, as it is possible to centralise all data and software of company in the virtual world. Therefore it is now possible to deploy software from the company's own cloud service, to access all ongoing projects and to make all information visible

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