This page contains a Flash digital edition of a book.
roundtable: cloud computing 49


itemised IT billing instead of a bundled bill.


• Agility – a key reason for uptake by early adopters.


Today, collaboration is emerging as an unexpected benefit of cloud, revealed Brown. “The early adopters are finding that they have achieved enhanced collaboration internally and with their business partners just by using cloud technologies. It is much easier to share and extend your value chain into your partners.


Lovell suggested that a mindset change was required over the current use of cloud services – orchestrating them better to help overall business operations. “The problem is that the industry modelled itself on cloud’s cost benefits to get customer ‘stickiness’, and the benchmark has become some cheap marketplace offerings. But are those products now right for the actual needs of individual businesses?”


Taylor: “Unfortunately, cost-saving was the key cloud message during the recession. It was a marketing hook that will make it harder to deliver some of the more nuanced cloud benefits and the cloud-centric data model that can overlay a company’s infrastructure.”


Lovell: “Our industry horizons became short-term because of the economic climate, but that is now beginning to change.”


Look and learn: Take a dip, but don’t get too wet!


Martin Taylor


“I think the jury is still out on whether cloud is cheaper. It probably is if you have a peaking demand.” He exampled seasonal retailers who could now avoid underuse and capital outlay on their own servers, by simply scaling up IT requirements through the cloud during their peak periods.


Darren Atkinson: “From the collaborative benefit aspect, some cloud-based services have pervaded the business environment almost without being invited. For instance, what we use for virtual conferencing today is not what we used historically. Cloud is giving us so many different collaborative methods for communication, but as yet not so many from a project perspective, because of compliance, confidentiality and confidence issues.”


Leblond said his clients, largely the reseller community, focused strongly on retaining their end-user customers, so Westcoast needed to sell cloud to resellers as a service through which they could add value to their customers’ businesses.


Murray asked if companies saw cloud as an extension to the SAAS model.


Martin Taylor argued that, whilst cloud was for many organisations still only an option to br reviewed alongside on-premise business and software solutions, it was at least being considered. “We find that if we can offer an initial competitive standalone cloud solution, then we proliferate through more economic second and third cloud options. Soon, a lot more of the client’s environment ends up in the cloud, because the benefits are incrementally greater the more services are run.”


THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – NOVEMBER 2012


Magazine editor Bree Freeman believes a lot of SMEs need educating about cloud computing before trying to reshape their business operations.


“Our advice is to find a provider and try out a small low impact project first. Dip your toe in, see how it goes.


“Cloud is still in its infancy, but it has so much promise. We are trying to educate our readership about cloud and demystify all the rubbish being put out about it. Yes there are risks, but small businesses simply want to know if moving over to something like Office 365 is OK for them or not.


“A lot of people don’t realise how much they use cloud computing already through social networking, but equally the IT industry needs to accept that small businesses can’t outlay on things like private cloud because they don’t have the money.”


However, Freeman suggested small businesses could easily move their telephone exchanges into cloud at relatively low cost. Collaboration with partners to produce hybrid reduced cost cloud systems serving like-minded companies, was also worth considering.


Is there a cloud of insecurity hanging over cloud?


Murray pointed out that NASDAQ and NATS, both data sensitive organisations, had recently moved to cloud. Are security issues still relevant, he asked.


Lawyer Tim Clark said security is still a number one concern, as evidenced by the recent Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) paper.


Tim Clark


Healing highlighted one notable resistance to cloud implementation. “It often comes from internal IT departments. Do they want to be turkeys voting for Christmas?” Self-survival tactics usually spotlighted the unknowns about cloud and corporate security worries.


Taylor felt the security argument was “often the lazy excuse of incompetent IT managers. They have built up and are proud of their IT empire, yet their on-premise infrastructure is probably less secure than what is offered in the cloud – they may have site resilience and


Continued overleaf ... www.businessmag.co.uk


The legal field was always playing catch-up to technological advance, he added, but it would gradually resolve any cloud legal issues, as it had done with software licensing over the past 15 years. “But, data integrity, security, and recovery is going to stay a concern for some time.”


Consumers of cloud services should consider where their data lives, said Clark. “Pulsant keeps all its cloud data in the UK but where providers put data storage out to other countries, different legal jurisdictions and security problems need to be considered.” The glib online acceptance of terms and conditions by UK companies could also present legal problems if the providers are based abroad. “At the end of a contract, for instance, how do you know the provider has given it all back, is it in a format you can use, are you sure it has deleted all copies and so on? And if you have a dispute, what does the contract say about where you will have to go to resolve it.”


Security issues would linger longer in organisations and professions that are “inherently conservative, regulated, or still required to produce paper evidence.”


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56