How You Can Use The Cloud For Rapid-Fire Innovation

He was facing intense pressure from the CEO to ratchet up the level of research and deliver new revenue-generating services, nevertheless his organization was spending more time and money than ever reacting to the latest crisis.

Turns out his issue is far from unequalled. In a McKinsey survey in 2010, 84 percent of global executives said they believed research is in the extreme important to their growth strategies, and 94 percent said they were unsatisfied with their research performance. Evenly enlightening is the finding by The Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project that "the pace of American research has slowed while the past four decades," even taking into account the advent of the PC, the Internet, Web 2.0, mobile technology and social media.

Clearly, research alone is not solving my colleague's research gap. However I did have an answer to his question. It involves a concept many business leaders have not but considered: Use the cloud.

Cloud computing has proved to be one of the most transformative new technologies of the past decade. In the cloud model, your applications and software-driven business services run "somewhere else" on the Internet, not on your company's servers. You pay a service provider for the resources you to tell the truth use – whether that's software, a development platform, or IT infrastructure – so you can eliminate much of the cost and inefficiency of traditional on-premises models. The cloud as well gives your business a higher level of agility because you can scale up and down on demand, and the cloud is mature enough to accommodate anything from small web apps to large-scale, mission-critical applications.

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