Answer:
For many years, leaders have questioned whether it is better to make or buy software solutions for the many business problems they face. Pros and cons are weighed to figure out what is going to be most cost-effective and efficient for the business. It's important to remember that accurately estimating the long-term consequences of this decision can be difficult. This often leaves those on the front lines struggling to pick up the slack.
The pace of technology innovation is accelerating at an exponential rate, making it difficult for the average internal IT group to cope with this pace of change. The struggle commonly lies in the fact that they not only have to create the software internally, but they must also maintain and upgrade it indefinitely.
Building the software has frequently won in this debate in the past, but with the introduction of cloud computing, the tables are turning. Now even large global enterprises in both public and private sectors that have invested tens of millions of dollars in internal IT infrastructure are beginning to migrate to cloud applications. In fact, the Gartner Group sees the public cloud for the hosting of enterprise applications as the fastest growing IT market in the next ten years. The largest enterprise software companies in the world (IBM, Oracle, SAP, etc.) see their future delivery platform as the cloud, so their customers are rapidly retiring in-house IT environments. This dramatically reduces IT operational costs and historical reliance on an internal IT staff for software development and support.
