Cloud Computing Impact on Countries and Economies

The assignment discusses the importance of cloud computing for countries and their economies, highlighting its cost-effectiveness and potential to enhance overall revenue. It also explores the position of cloud computing in the Arab region compared to other regions like Asia, EU, and USA, noting lower adoption rates and challenges such as legal issues, environmental concerns, and power consumption. The document provides a summary of the benefits and challenges of cloud computing in the Arab region.

Part 1:
What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing can be defined as the on demand delivery of database storage, compute
power, applications and various other IT resources with the help of a cloud service platform via
the internet. Those organizations that provide the service are known as Cloud providers and they
charge the companies who use their cloud computing services on the basis of their usage.
The vital purpose of cloud computing is to share resources in order to achieve economies
of scale as well as coherence. In a simpler form, it can be stated that cloud computing is nothing
but computing based on internet. Before cloud computing, an individual had to compute after
downloading a computing software or application on a computer. Moreover, if the exchange
server becomes overtasked, the file server used to fill up resulting in hardware failure.With the
emergence of cloud computing, individuals can access similar kinds of application through the
internet. Updating one’s status on social media platform or checking bank balance on phone can
be considered as two of the most common example of cloud computing. The chief benefit of
cloud computing is that it provides the service users with quick access to low cost as well as
flexible IT resources (Cloud competitiveness index, 2017). Due to the emergence of cloud
computing, companies are able to provide the perfect type and size of computing resources that
are required to power an effective idea and operate the IT department. Moreover, this technology
save the cost of the organization since the above mentioned tasks can be done without spending a
huge amount of money and time on investment and management of the hardware.
Types of cloud computing

The term ‘Cloud computing’ can be described based on two factors, namely, location of the
cloud or the service offered by the cloud. Based on the location of the cloud, cloud computing
can be classified in to the following types.
Public cloud: This type of cloud can be defined as computing services offered by the third party
providers through public Internet. This type of cloud is available to any individual who want to
buy or purchase it (Hashem et al., 2015).
Private cloud: This is a cloud computing model where the IT service is made available to a single
organization. Private cloud is managed through internal resources.
Community Cloud: This type of cloud computing refers to a collaborative effort where
infrastructure is shared between a good numbers of organizations from a specific community
whose concerns are similar.
Hybrid Cloud: Hybrid cloud computing can be defined as a process of cloud computing which
uses a mix of on-premises, private and public cloud computing.
Based on the service offered by the cloud, cloud computing can be classified into:
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): the mentioned Cloud offers Infrastructure as a Service tout
data-center space, servers along with network equipment that include routers and software’s for
business.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): this service provisions a full hardware as well as software
framework that allow application to run. Examples of PaaS are service provided by Amazon,
Google and Microsoft.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS): This is a process of provisioning commercially available software
but giving access over the net. A popular example of SaaS is Google Docs.
Importance of cloud computing to business
Cloud computing can be considered a highly beneficial aspect for businesses across the
world since it enhances the efficiency and cash flow of the company. Some of the major benefits
of cloud computing is as follows:
Flexibility
Those businesses which have fluctuating or increasing bandwidth demands requires
Cloud based services. Cloud computing enhances the flexibility of the company since it is really
easy to scale up or down the cloud capacity by drawing the remote servers of the services. This,
in turn, enhances the competitive advantages of the businesses.For instance, employees of
several organizations can access files and share documents with the help ofSmartphone,
notebooks and laptops.
Disaster Recovery
In spite of the fact that all businesses should have an effective disaster recovery plan,
smaller businesses with low financial capabilities often found to suffer a lot due to lack of
expertise and cash. Cloud computing enables an organization to efficiently recover from a
disaster by implementing recovery solutions and cloud-based backup, in order to save time and
avoid huge investment in recovery (Kushida, Murray &Zysman, 2015). Small organizations are
more likely to implement cloud computing to handle their business more effectively compared to
large organizations. Three types ofCloud disaster recoveriesnamely in-house, partially In-house
and purchased service can be implemented by an Organization.In-house recovery is the most

expensive recovery plan, where the organization repairs its own cloud system in a self service
provisioning environment. Partially in-house is a comparatively less expensive system, where the
organization has to partially depend on external IT service provider in an Elasticity Cloud
environment. In Robust recovery plans usually the smaller organizationsdepend entirely on their
IT service provider, where they can have the cheapest recovery service within a Pay per Use
agreement.
Capital-expenditure free
The high cost of implementing hardware can be avoided by cloud computing. Cloud
computing is much inexpensive and the payment model is subscription based. For instance, by
implementing cloud computing, Organizations are able to cut off the high costs of hardware
installation that ranges from 13.99 dollars to 45.06 dollars.
Increased collaboration
Cloud computing enhances the collaboration of the workers by enabling them to edit,
access and share documents from anywhere at any point in time. This technology provides the
team members with full visibility of the collaboration.In several organizations, cloud computing
is used for internal communication and viewing a common document which in turn enhance the
efficiency of the employees.
Document control

Before cloud computing, employees used to send and receive files through email
attachment and as a result conflict in the file content, titles and formats were evidenced.
However through cloud computing, all files are stored centrally and a single version is visible to
everyone (Hashem et al., 2015). Thus document control is efficiently done through cloud
computing.
Figure 1: Cloud Document Management
Source (Garrison, Wakefield & Kim, 2015)
Types of businesses that utilize cloud computing

The major types of businesses that utilize cloud computing are as follows.
Marketing Groups
It is really crucial for Marketing Groups to upload and access daily records from fields,
home and offices. Cloud computing enables them to do so. Several teams and clients are able to
upload and assess new information. Moreover, cloud computing helps the business to control the
access of the users.The activities ofmarketing groups involve marketing of the products or
services of a company both online and offline (Garrison, Wakefield & Kim, 2015).
Shared office space Leasing Organization
Shared office space leasing organization offers lease to other primary organizations for
short term or prolonged period of time in exchange of rent. These types of companies use cloud
computing to provide the facilities of booking meeting rooms that in turn, enables the tenants to
check the availability of rooms and helps the management to manage the meetings from a single
booking platform.
Data Securities Companies
Data security firms mainly focus on enhancing cyber securities in private and public
sectors.These firms use cloud computing to move the files of their consumers around
continually. As a result, these files are much more difficult to found and hacked by the
hackers.
Importance of cloud computing to countries and their economies
Cloud computing has the ability to impose a highly positive impact on the economics of
the countries. Since cloud computing involves sharing of computing resources instead of

recruiting employees or local servers to handle them, it is highly cost effective (Zissis&Lekkas,
2012). Social media platforms like Pinterest, Instragram and organizations like Apple uses cloud
computing. Implementation of cloud computing in the business of the developing and
underdeveloped countries will result in enhancement of the overall revenue of the businesses in
the international market. Furthermore, the chief cloud service providers at the global stage are
Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, Google, ServiceNow, VMware and Workday
(Garrison, Wakefield & Kim, 2015).
Position of cloud computing in the Arab region in comparison to other regions such as
Asia, EU, USA
When it comes to business, the adaptation of digital technologies in the Arab region is
lower when compared to that of Asia, EU and USA. According to a survey, only 18 percent of
the Small and middle sized companies located in the United Arab Emiratesand Egypt and a mere
15 percent in Saudi Arabia have online presence (cloudscorecard.bsa.org., 2016). However, a
good number of channels, consumer journeys, internal processes and activities are getting
digitalized recently. It is expected that by the end of 2019, the Middle Eastern region including
Arab Emirates will experience the highest cloud traffic growth upto 41 percent. When it comes
to cloud computing in Arabian region, a good number of Arabian countries are raising legal
issues associated with lack of information securities, environmental concerns and a large amount
of power consumption. When it comes to cloud computing, one of the major practical challenges
faced by the Arab regions include lack of the availability to obtain latest applications as well as
software within a reasonable price range.
Besides that, the persistent reluctance of Arabian policy makers, administrative, national and
political decision makers to implement cloud computing (Garrison, Wakefield & Kim, 2015).

Since EU, USA and majority of the countries in Asia have efficient digital infrastructure, these
issues are not faced by them.

Reference List
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cloudscorecard.bsa.org.(2016). Cloudscorecard.bsa.org. Retrieved 13 March 2018, from
http://cloudscorecard.bsa.org/2016/pdf/BSA_2016_Global_Cloud_Scorecard.pdf
Garrison, G., Wakefield, R. L., & Kim, S. (2015). The effects of IT capabilities and delivery
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