everyone is talking about cloud, but what the benefits is the cloud bringing to the companies, especially the small and medium ones?
the most obvious one is probably the cutting down of the cost spent on IT, both for the hardware, software, and the personnel. we don’t need to build up the whole IT infrastructure ourselves, like data servers, exchange servers, and even domain servers, and correspondingly, we don’t need that many IT people to maintain such things like before.
and another one is the simplification of the IT procedure from both the IT perspective and that of the normal end users. take the Microsoft shared mailbox for example, creating and managing the shared mailbox from the Office 365 admin portal is much easier than in the on-premise environments, though the on-premise itself is changing as well, like compared with previous versions, it needs much less effort to create and manage shared mailbox in EAC in Exchange 2013 and later.
technology is changing, like most of the things around. with some possible problems, like concern of security and the inconvenience of the control of the other aspects (like the infrastructure if we are on office 365), it undoubtedly brings much more convenience and benefits to us as well, which probably bypass the bad things much much more.