Short Report on Current Information Technology (management information Essay

Short Report on Current Information Technology (management information system) - Essay Example Discussion of Key Points in the Two Articles, Comparison and Contrast The two articles both make good exposition of the business and technical promises and challenges of cloud computing both for the providers of cloud computing services and infrastructures, such as the Amazon cloud computing offerings, and those of Microsoft. The first article makes a point about the business promise of Amazon cloud services in the long term, pointing out that although the services rack relatively lower sales compared to the more mainstream businesses of Amazon, cloud computing services benefit from having higher profit margins as compared to Amazon’s other offerings. This translates to higher profitability for Amazon and an area that the company can exploit, given that there are few companies with the scale and the customer base, and the necessary long-term vision to execute on a cloud computing strategy and infrastructure, as Amazon does (Oursler, 2013). The second article on the other hand complements the discussion on the more business aspects of cloud computing that the first article focused on, to undertake a more technical discussion on what the components of a cloud computing architecture are, and what the key issues and challenges are relating to the way customers make use and leverage cloud computing for their own particular purposes (Sleit et al., 2013, pp. 35-44). ... While the first article is more oriented towards finance and business types, the second article focuses on the more technical and CIO-type issues relating to cloud computing (Oursler, 2013; Sleit et al., 2013). Going into the details, the first article notes that in reality, of the $61 billion dollars in business that Amazon generates as a whole from all of its businesses, cloud computing revenues is a small part, about five percent of the total revenues of the firm. This means that in all there is a small importance placed right now on the weighting given to the cloud business of the company relative to its other businesses when it comes to putting valuations on the Amazon stock price. These are financial considerations to be sure, but underneath these figures is a vote for Amazon’s technological prowess in the cloud. The article notes too that in a sector that is poised for dramatic growth in the coming years, from a base of $131 billion dollars this year. Amazon has a leadi ng position in this growing sector, with a number of notable accounts that have come to include the CIA. The CIA account for Amazon, in particular, is a vote for the technological capacity of the Amazon cloud services to take on the most complex and the most security-intensive activities. Moreover, given the leading position of Amazon, the article notes that it is in a position to capitalize on its growing technological capabilities to continue to lead the industry in the middle of sustained competition from the likes of Oracle and Hewlett-Packard. To be sure, at present, Amazon’s market share in cloud computing services is said to dwarf the combined shares of the next 14 competitors in the space by a factor of 5. Beyond the numbers, this overwhelming early lead and the quality