A SWOT Analysis is a business tool used to assess a company’s competitive standing. More specifically, a SWOT Analysis will strategically measure strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. When measuring a company’s strengths, the analysis will assess characteristics or attributes of the company that give it a competitive advantage over others. When measuring a company’s weaknesses, the SWOT will identify ways in which other companies, in the same industry, outperform the company being analyzed. Both strengths and weaknesses are internal; meaning, the analysis of strengths and weaknesses are coming from the company itself not any external or outside forces (Burrows, 2008). Although the definition of the above SWOT analysis is geared towards a company, we believe that we can apply the same analysis to a technology like Cloud computing. The opportunities and threats portion of the analysis are analyzing external forces that can have a positive or negative impact to the evolution of Cloud computing. Specifically, the opportunities portion will describe ways to expand Cloud computing while the threats will focus on what can prevent Cloud computing to expand.
Strengths
A key strength of Cloud computing is lower IT costs. Significant capital is spent every year by companies across the US to run IT departments. Cloud computing reduce IT costs related to hardware and software. As an example, a company using Cloud technology does not need to have its own data centers since the cloud provider is offering data storage as a service. Running a data center can be expensive for an organization and there are instances where some of the resources within data center are not working. According to Paul Goodison, CEO of Cormant, an infrastructure management company, a server can cost something like $2,000 a year, and somewhere between 10 and 30 percent of your servers are dead. In a 4,000-server enterprise, if 400 of them are dead, you 're looking at a bill