Wireless communication is without a doubt the largest change to business now and no business taking them selves seriously could function without it. Just today for example, I used my 4G LTE smart phone in tether mode to connect my laptop to the Internet, so I could VPN into our intranet, so that I could video chat on internal Lync systems and download a file. Doing that in 2005 would have been possible but would have taken way more time and effort as well as a lot more resources on my end. I think they main issue now that's facing all of us and especially companies, isn't knowing about or how to use the technology, it's how much it's used. Just as the text says "...by 2016 the amount of data traffic generated by mobile smart phones will be about equal to the volume of traffic generated by mobile computers." (Stair & Reynolds, 2015). Not just in my personal life are we slammed now with how much broadband we are using (especially in the form of smart phones) But at work even with all this technology I am limited. If I try and e-mail outside of the intranet, it's capped to 10MB of files, so everything has to be zipped. Video chats are capped at 30 minutes unless IT overrides data overages. So while the benefits are amazing, until bandwidth stops becoming the bottleneck and we stop expecting things to come at even faster speeds it will start to slow down the new day-to-day business speeds.
As an Infantryman, I rely heavily on my ability to communicate with others in my unit, other units, and our support elements, often from isolated areas. This isolation means that we do not have "land lines" to communicate back and forth. We rely on wireless communications in a variety of forms from FM to satellite communications. These types of communications offer us the ability to encrypt our transmissions, something that was very difficult in the early days of wireless technology, one of the reasons for the code talkers from WWII. Without wireless communications, we would be stuck using wired communication over short distances and other types of unsecured wired communications for longer distance. We definitely would not be able to speak with our air support. Stair and Reynolds (2014) describe wireless communications as an improvement in how and where we communicate, plan, and share information by using a broad range of frequencies to cover a broad range of applications. Since my job relies heavily on the ability to communicate in any environment, I would say they are correct.
Cloud computing is an impressive way to use the internet to improve a business. "Cloud computing: method of running application software and storing related data in central computer systems and providing customers or other users access to them through the Internet." (Carr, 2014) These large centers of data can be quite expensive, as one could imagine. The benefits are quite clear but the security might not be so cut and dry. The security from cloud to cloud changes and depends on many things with a large amount of possible issues. "Cloud security problems are very challenging, due to (1) the heterogeneity of cloud stacks, (2) lack of formal and semantically equivalent security requirements (which often vary depending on the considered domain), (3) lack of a stable categorization of techniques, (4) need of balancing between security, flexibility, and high performance, and (5) lack of transparency on activities and events happening in the cloud back-end." (Ardagna...Vu, 2015)
Cloud computing has many advantages, it can be used by just about any company and is just as secure as any internet linked system. Other advantages to cloud based systems are more flexibility to get into different businesses. Cloud based resources allows for experimentation very quickly. Normal processes that take days or years can be accomplished in hours or minutes due to the ability to access several different systems without the investment of supporting systems that may not get used after the initial testing. Another advantage is integration of businesses from mergers. With access to electronic cloud based records, it's easier to bring data from one business into another. Transferring information in paper form can take days or years and in some cases may never get done, but if the access and format is easier to integrate into existing data the time and money is lessened. Cloud based also affords businesses the ability to integrate business practices and add on information into existing businesses. An example is how FedEx and UPS have granted tracking info access into retail websites such as Amazon and Wayfair. After you have placed an order you can track your order online through integration between both websites. Without cloud based resources this would be much harder and may not have been developed yet.