3. Cloud Computing and Social Commerce

In today’s world businesses are growing at a tremendous speed and so are their clients and customers. Such a fast growing pace is causing lack of resources and their proper utilization. One of the examples is the usage of IT technology. The use of IT in today’s growing businesses has expanded to such a great extent that it is posing problem for the organization to serve and satisfy their customers. The business during peak hours (time when maximum customers want to be served) is extremely difficult to handle. Some of the common examples are railway reservation when the window for ticket reservation just opens, students visiting website when results are declared, ticket bookings on weekends, etc. To serve the customers in these cases companies can’t go after continuously installing the new systems and resources because they would be unused during non-peak hours. Such a problem gives rise to a new solution which is known as Cloud Computing in which resources are shared to adjust the traffic of the requests to be served. But the question is where do we start from? With the growing hype about cloud computing there are some more questions creeping into the minds of management about implementing cloud solutions in their organizations. For example, which case it will be the most helpful? How will it improve the efficiencies? Which areas it will not be fruitful? Should we adapt to cloud-based solutions or not? These are some of the questions which we will try to answer in this chapter.