The Economic Value of the Cloud and its Adoption in Costa Rica

Cloud Computing, more than a new technology, is a new IT consumption model. It allows using and paying for resources on demand, avoiding any investment in fixed assets. With this model customers can attain tremendous cost savings, while at the same time having rapid access to IT resources that can be used to experiment, innovate, and grow, with having to wait for funding. Everyone should be using cloud services at least for some elements of their IT architectures.

However, the cloud model has a low adoption rate in Costa Rica. While 68% of firms claim to be using cloud services, only 38% are using something other than SaaS. Moreover, most of the SaaS users are running email (e.g., Gmail) and personal backups (e.g., DropBox), which are not necessarily cutting edge applications. Thus, the cloud in Costa Rica is still in its infancy.

In the video below (in Spanish) corresponds to a talk I gave on May 27, 2014, at the Costa Rican Technology Research Club to CIOs and managers from Costa Rican firms. Through the talk, we first go through the elements of the cloud business model. We then analyze its economic value, starting with the savings enjoyed by providers through their economies of scale and the aggregation of users’ demands, and then focusing on the value of the cloud’s scalability for end users. Finally, we discuss the results of a survey done to 174 Costa Rican firms to reflect if and how they are using cloud services. The talk received some media coverage in local newspaper El Financiero.

I hope to write more on these specific topics on separate posts.