TECHNOLOGY
Despiteall therecentpublicity surrounding cloud computing and the positive advantages it could offer to businesses,many business owners are still inclining to put it on the long finger. So why is this? Many are uncomfortable with the idea that data that once sat
in the server room, secure within the bricks andmortar confines of the building, could soon be accessible to any executive, any- where and on any device.Quite rightly they think about the sec- urity implications of this:why should their data beminglingwith the greatmasses, and what if it fell into the wrong hands? But to feel this way is missing a very important point – flexibility and cost effectiveness. Cloud computing effectively takes all the data that used to sit
in a data centre inside a premises – andwas only accessible in that premises – and insteadmakes it available securely and affordably to peoplewho need it,when they need it.This can be via any dev- ice: a smartphone, a laptop and even a tablet PC. For one thing you don’t need to have that server roomeating up
electricity anymore, so the environmental and sustainability ben- efits are obvious.For another,yourworkers and youwill always be able to keep working no matter what happens or where you are. If your building burns down, you stay operational. If you’re stuck in an airport but need to fulfil that important sales order, just go online and do it. It seems that lack of knowledge about cloud computing is the
main inhibitor.Awhite paper published by the Irish InternetAss- ociation (IIA) last year revealed that few Irish businesses or pub- lic bodies see the cloud-computing opportunity as away of saving money and beingmore productive. The barriers, the IIA report says, to every business in Ireland
being able to access the cloud opportunity are obvious: lack of understanding and a lack of quality, ubiquitous broadband.Fail- ure to get these two factors right could mean Irish firms, in sore need of a revival,maymiss out on productivity opportunities. The IIAdocument also points out that 43pc of Irish ITman-
agers and some 85pc of financemanagers are unclear about what cloud computing actually is. The irony is thatmost businesses and theirworkers are already
using the cloud. If you have aHotmail orGmail account for exa- mple, you are using the cloud. If you use iTunes, you are too. Many sophisticated software business models have grown
up around the cloud – think about
Salesforce.com, a customer relationshipmanagement (CRM) database that sits on the inter- net and is being used by hundreds of thousands of businesses
EXAMPLES OF CLOUD SERVICES ONLINE:
Amazon EC2: Amazon’s Elastic Compute CloudWeb Service which provides computing capacity in the cloud for software developers.
Amazon S3: Amazon’s Simple Storage Services, a cloud storage systemfor the internet.
BPOS:Microsoft’s growing online family of services for businesses, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Communications Online and Office LiveMeeting.
Google Apps: Office productivity suite including email, document sharing aswell as Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, spreadsheets and presentations.
worldwide.Then there are all the latestMicrosoft technologies – SharePoint,Exchange andOutlook –which also sit in the cloud. Paul Rellis, countrymanager ofMicrosoft Ireland, agrees, and
points out that actually Irish companies aren’t laggards in cloud computing but are, in fact, leaders.“Ireland is leading theworld in cloud adoption,and right nowup to 1,000 software apps are being used and tested by Irish firms.We see an enormous latent appetite and expect adoption of cloud computing by Irish ownermanagers and corporations in the next two to three years to grow rapidly.” The ease with which cloud computing can be deployed is
breathtaking. “Previously if five companies wanted to collaborate on a new product, for example, you’d have set up an extranet and itwould takemonths.Nowyou just sign up toMicrosoftBusiness ProductivityOnline Suite (BPOS) for €5 per person per month and you are up and running in 25minutes.” Rellis said that so far 10,000 people in Ireland have signed up for BPOS,making the country a world leader proportionately.
CONSUMERISATIONOF IT EMCConsulting chief technology officerRobertGrigg says the consumerisation of ITand cloud computing is changing the busi- ness landscape. “Everybody is talking about the cloud and that’s a good thing. It is driving the technology wave and driving the cloud IT business to be sharp and focused. “Most organisations today have, to some extent, thought about
making themove to cloud computing.Many have a strategy and are investing in changing their IT infrastructure to be cloud- enabled or a hybrid of traditional IT and the cloud. “Tomymind the benefits of the cloud outweigh the fears, and
the key nowis to address fears,which centre around security.More conservative IT decision-makers fear that it’s sacrificing security in order to move from capital-expenditure costs to operational- cost efficiencies,”Grigg says. Once upon a
timeAmazon.comused to just be an online book-
seller.Today it is a cloud-computing giant providing a vast array of online storage and cloud-security services.To the chief tech- nology officer of
Amazon.com,DrWerner Vogels, who was in Dublin recently to address the Cloud Summit, the flexibility of moving from a capital-expenditure (capex) environment to an operational-expenditure (opex) environment is too attractive to ignore in recessionary times. “The oldworldmeant lots of capex,underutilised infrastructure
and wasted time and focus on undifferentiated IT. “The new world is no capex, pay for what you use and the
IBMSmart Business: IBM’s cloud-solutions family, including IBMSmart Analytics Cloud, Smart Business Storage Cloud, Information Archive, Lotus Live and Lotus Live iNotes.
Mozy: An online back-up tool, provided by EMC, including MozyHome andMozyPro.
Salesforce.com:
Salesforce.com’s CRMsolution is broken down into severalmodules: Sales, Service&Support, Partner RelationshipManagement,Marketing, Content, Ideas, Analytics, and its collaboration platform, Chatter.
Windows Live Services:Microsoft’s cloud-based consumer applications,which includeWindows LiveMail,Windows Live Photo Gallery,Windows Live Calendar,Windows Live Skydrive, Windows Live Spaces,Windows LiveMessenger andWindows Live forMobile.
VOL 3 ISSUE 4 2010 OWNER MANAGER 33
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