Cloud Somersault

I often talk to people about "the cloud" and it's clear there is a lot of confusion about this, what it is and what it can do for your company.  Much of this is led by the fear of your company data in a place that you don't own and control.  I must stress here that I am talking about true cloud services and not old style computing equipment renamed as "private cloud".

10 years ago I worked on a project to consolidate a computing environment, at the time people had departmental file servers and found this move to location based servers to be a loss of control.  Then some years later as computing power improved and in particular network reliability increased we moved to a truly centralised store, again this was met with some fear and suspicion about lack of control. Moving computing to the cloud is only a matter of taking the final logical step, yet this for many companies proves hard to achieve.

I believe that this step will not be willingly taken and that market forces will have to act to make larger companies utilise the cloud.  This has begun on a cost saving basis but even so it is not yet a big enough driver for larger businesses to leave the safety of familiar IS provision.  My feeling is that smaller companies that have currently started with most of their services provided by the cloud will begin to grow, putting them in a position to compete with the larger established companies.  They will however be operating with a much lower cost base courtesy of cloud computing. Eventually the only way to compete will be to adopt these same cloud systems.
Of course there will be other drivers, as companies begin to deliver necessary software using only a cloud model (so they can control access to their technology via subscription) this will force adoption of these systems.

So why haven't larger companies implemented cloud services?  Here are some suggestions

• The fear of lack of control of their data, or some form of data leakage.
• Internal subversive IS pressure to ignore this in order to preserve careers, normally by contributing to the fear.
• Concerns that all your eggs in one basket makes you vulnerable.
• IS Management has evolved from support in the 1990's to their current role and are not willing to consider the change to the model.
• Strategically waiting to see which cloud provider wins out.

I'm sure you can think of others but the thing to consider is whether or not the adoption of cloud now will give you an advantage in the future.  I personally believe it will and I further believe that non adoption could put the company at a significant disadvantage.