The industry cloud has taken off and big businesses have been built by the likes of Veeva, Rootstock, and others. Here’s why the focus has allowed the industry to thrive even as giants like Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP eye their turf.

This ebook, based on the latest ZDNet/TechRepublic special feature, offers a detailed look at what industry cloud is and how companies have been putting it to work.

From the ebook

The ascent of cloud computing has enabled organizations small and large the ability to scale computing resources to meet their workloads, eliminating the need for building and maintaining data centers, slow CapEx planning processes, and likewise eliminating costs of the expense powering servers with unutilized capacity due to variable workloads.

Potential benefits of cloud computing have not been realized uniformly across all industries, however. A number of sectors have unique data protection or retention regulations, or contextual factors—such as poor internet connectivity in places of work—that limit the practicality of general-purpose, fully public cloud deployments.

As cloud solutions continue to mature, major public cloud providers are investing in solutions to meet specialized industry needs. Likewise, specialized cloud service providers are entering the cloud wars to deliver highly polished and targeted features and support, acting as a “cloud concierge” to migrate legacy/on-premises systems into the cloud, as well as providing industry-specific applications. Together, these initiatives are known as the “industry cloud.”

This article examines what businesses ned to know about industry cloud, while the remainder of this ZDNet/TechRepublic special report covers other industry cloud-related issues in more detail.