Thursday 7th June, 2012

The news recently has been that we’re over the cloud. In fact, according to a recent survey, we're bored of it. To me that didn’t quite ring true.  Bored? Perhaps. Over it? No. The boredom comes from overuse of a buzz word which people still find hard to define - which then becomes irritating.  But my feeling is that real knowledge is still limited.

My suspicions were confirmed during a break out session at the Ariba Live conference in Barcelona, where Ariba’s Senior Solutions Product Marketing Manager, Dan Ashton asked “who here is 100% confident that they understand the cloud?” In a room filled with finance professionals, not one person raised their hand. Of course it’s possible to put some of that down to a squirming unwillingness to stand out in a crowd, however, it’s more likely that no-one felt entirely confident in the level of their knowledge.

Given that the theory behind the buzz word is fairly straightforward – is it just that the term cloud is, well – cloudy? For example, as Dan said, you don’t hear Amazon or Facebook talking about the cloud, they just provide a platform and service that people understand, and let people get on with it. The trouble is that where there’s confusion, the door is open for misunderstanding and people give up thinking about it.

So, let me try and break it down:

Essentially there are three types of cloud solution; infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and the perhaps more familiar, software as a service.  Infrastructure as a service is essentially simply outsourcing your hardware to an provider, whereas platform as a service involves outsourced hardware from which you can also run your own software, and then there’s software as a service (SaaS) which provides everything you need from end to end – such as Amazon, Ariba, Facebook etc.

Within these three types you can shake it up a bit depending on the needs of your organisation. For example, you could have a the totally public cloud which is open to anyone and everyone, the community cloud which is accessible to certain pre-determined individuals within a specified group, a private cloud which is useful for internal organisational communications – or a hybid of each. The latter can be useful if you need to keep certain functions private while maintaining a general high level of openness.

Before migrating business to the cloud, the most important question to ask, is why, and what’s in it for your organisation? With 66% of CEO’s seeing investing in the cloud as a competitive business strategy*, it’s clear that the high profile benefits – cost reduction, process improvement and a more transparent business function are being effectively translated to C-Level staff. With that level of buy-in, those affected had better be in the driving seat, clear on solution type, with who and why, before it’s too late and they're lumbered with a platform delivered from the top down.

So what are the obstacles?

Probably the biggest hurdle for most people thinking about migrating to the cloud is security, yet interestingly 80% of CSOs (Chief Security Officers) in a recent survey* pointed out that they were “fairly confident” in cloud technology. Of course you can never be complacent and security will always be an issue when you're dealing with sensitive data in an open network, but if the correct precautions are in place, security concerns shouldn’t put you off. On top of that, the lack of clarity in pricing can scare people off. However, there are providers out there who steer clear of the piecemeal approach which can leave customers with a bigger overall fee than they had anticipated. Some like Tradeshift and Ariba have clear and sensible pricing policies.

For some, standardisation is the problem. And for some, that’s where the whole premise of the cloud falls down. Some organisations feel that the way they do things are simply too different to slot comfortably into a tight platform. However, this is where I believe they’re wrong. Most cloud solutions do allow for a certain amount of flexibility, but allow too much and the set up starts to wobble. To be able to leverage the benefits cloud solutions bring, the base code needs to remain the same for everyone.

Becoming involved in the cloud opens up huge opportunities for benchmarking and extracting key analytics and connecting across the globe in real time. Esentially, the bigger the cloud, the bigger the potential to link-up and take advantage of business opportunities, as well as provide a platform to drive process improvements in an easily auditable, cost effective way.

*Source: IDG Enterprise