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Cloud computing once was considered only for large enterprises. Learn what's driving more small and mid-sized firms to transition to a cloud network.

Does your organization view the cloud as technology for the future? Or a sophisticated networking and industrial computing prospect available only to large enterprises? It's time to rethink what's possible. Every manufacturer can confidently make the move to cloud-based computing.

This article explores the characteristics that enable a manufacturer to deploy a cloud network for storing, accessing, sharing and leveraging data from Internet-connected devices.

The manufacturing industries are constantly looking for ways to cut costs, increase revenue, efficiency, speed, and so on, and advancements in technology are key to furthering this cause. Today, there are several emerging technologies that are having a significant impact on how companies operate. And one that is being embraced with increasingly open arms is cloud manufacturing software.

Cloud, or software as a service (SaaS), based solutions offer many benefits to end users that are making it attractive to manufacturers. There are of course still the ever-present security concerns and the question of data ownership, as well as the more cut-and-dried issue of network connectivity. And it should be noted that one of the keys to making a cloud-based manufacturing operations solution viable is to ensure that that architecturally there is enough redundancy that production will not be affected if access to the cloud is interrupted.

Nonetheless, the rise in adoption rates shows that many manufacturers are seeing enough advancements in cloud technology and the associated quick ROI for implementing cloud-based software solutions today, along with an anticipation for even larger considerations for tomorrow.

My colleague's Uncle once asked him "What is cloud computing? Do you really keep your data on clouds?" The idea seems highly far-fetched ! Most of the general public do not know what  cloud computing signifies.

They are saying cloud computing is the next big thing in IT.  Before coming to NGR, even I thought cloud was some kind of a big-time new IT invention, which the lesser mortals of this world are not supposed to know. Probably, that’s why the word, cloud. You either had to be above the world or into the cloud to understand cloud!

In this blog, we will discuss how project centric engineered to order products and complex build to order products can benefit from being managed by supply chain software set up entirely in the cloud.

First, lets discuss companies dealing with project centric engineered to order products. A recent article in Industry Week gives a perfect example for this type of situation. The story starts with a European company servicing an oil exploration. The company serviced the exploration by delivering large project specific vales and gears. These projects typically took the company years to complete due to the extremely high potency of constant delays. This forced the company to end up manufacturing gears and having to hold them in stock as the project timeline continues to slip.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the only driver for cloud computing adoption was cost saving. In actual fact there are numerous benefits of cloud computing driving its adoption worldwide.

Research from Gartner forecasts that cloud computing will make up 20% of all IT budgets in 2012.

Growth in cloud-based business solutions is usually credited to its lower total cost of ownership (TCO) delivered when compared with traditional on-premise models. Certainly the cost savings available to business taking up cloud computing were an invaluable marketing tool, particularly against the economic backdrop of the Global Financial Crisis in the late 2000s. But whilst cost effectiveness is a compelling reason for its adoption, there are many other equally persuasive advantages offered by the technology.