Yeah, yeah, cloud computing is great. So what? What does it have to do with us? Why should we adopt cloud computing if we don’t fully understand the real benefits yet?

Here is my point. We know that cloud computing will make a huge difference, although we don’t know what difference it will be. There is a gap between what we don’t know and what we know. The true value of cloud computing, I believe, is to fill in this gap by enabling us to know what we don’t know yet. Just like Google, the internet search giant, is building an experimental superfast broadband network 100 times faster than most home broadband connections. Who knows how much value will be created if people were given a flood of connectivity at a consumer-level price?! But the crowd wants to have a taste and find out what will happen!

The same thing happens in the cloud computing market. For example,small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are playing a significant role in facilitating the adoption of cloud computing.  According to the research, companies with fewer than 500 employees account for half of all private-sector workers, and SMBs produce half of the private, non-farm GDP in the United States. What will happen when cloud computing enables these companies to access big data at an affordable price? What will happen when they can easily adjust their business size to the economic fluctuations? How much innovation will blossom from there and change the world?

Don’t you want to find out the answers? Where do you think cloud computing is taking us?

We do not know the future of cloud computing, but one thing we do know is that cloud computing will make a huge impact on the way we do business and in the way we live. According to Federico Etro, an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Milan, cloud computing will be the next big technology. He mentions in his blog, “Once diffusion gathers apace, cloud computing could significantly boost GDP growth and could create around a million EU jobs within five years.” Cloud computing will affect us fundamentally in all aspects.

Let’s see what will happen as businesses re-orient themselves around the cloud model:

• Create new capacities to solve new problems that were not addressable before
• Allow business to focus on innovation rather than maintain all of the legacy systems and services sourced by the business
• Fundamentally change the organizational structures and models, cultural norms and working dynamics as business centralize their data and outsource their IT infrastructure
• Transform IT from an asset-focused or technology-centric delivery organization into the strategic service-sourcing control point for the enterprise.

We should understand that cloud computing is not only a technology evolution, but also a business revolution. It enables business to cope with the constantly changing market environment. It is such a transformative force that it can not be ignored.

First, let’s think about the internet. Have we learned the real benefits of it?

In 1969, the internet was started at the University of California, Los Angeles. It grew dramatically in the 1990s, as the public saw that the internet connected their computers to facilitate the exchange of information and helped improve manageability. Yet they may never have imagined how the internet would change the world over the next two decades.

In the 21^st century, we do almost everything online—shopping, viewing apartments, social networking, advertising, tutoring, etc. And the internet has been used everywhere—governments, banks, libraries, science centers and all kinds of businesses. We are living in the world of internet! Yet we are still cultivating the new values of the internet, just like digging an enormous gold mine. New innovations continue to emerge. Even today, we can not define how much we can really benefit from the internet.

Similarly, cloud computing heated up only a few years ago. The technology still needs defining, the public, educating, and the market, stabilizing. With so many uncertainties, can we really foresee what impacts cloud computing will make? Can we understand the real benefits of cloud computing? Well…we can’t, because we don’t know what we don’t know!