Member Article

‘Living in the Cloud’ is explored by ITPS

As cloud services continues to occupy the top spot in tech circles, Garry Sheriff, MD of £10m business solutions experts ITPS (www.it-ps.com), gives us his view on how the market will pan out.

“By 2015 the global cloud services market will be worth around £108 billion, with financial services, public sector, manufacturing and the high-tech sector leading the adoption wave. But there is still some confusion, with a recent survey showing that 25% of SMEs do not understand the cloud concept or its benefits.

Basically, cloud is the use of internet-based services to support an organisation so you only pay for what you use. Both capital and operating expenditure are slashed because you do not need to buy and maintain a large physical infrastructure of servers, storage and software.

The business gets ‘anywhere, anytime’ availability and an easily scalable infrastructure. And in the event of even a massive disaster such as your premises burning down, a large business could be back up and running in a few hours.

Big players like Apple, Amazon and Google have been quick to see the revenue potential and are offering very cheap deals. This is fine if you can live with a non-guaranteed restore time to get your personal data back on your home PC, but that’s not tenable for a business.

These services are cheap because they can use a small bandwidth connection to squirt data up to the cloud. Restoring it needs a much bigger pipeline so it’s a numbers game for the providers, who are gambling that they will be doing more uploading than downloading. If you are being promised the earth at a very low cost, how much effort will the provider put into helping you get back up and running?

Some of them are selling a solution without having the technical competencies behind it, but unfortunately you won’t find out about that until you are stuck without all your data and applications. When customers complain, they are told it’s a problem at their end. In a free market I don’t see them putting up with this for long.

The success of cloud adoption depends on two elements – the strength of your existing communications network, and the design of your infrastructure. If your internet connection in general is poor, your cloud experience will be poor too.

The design element – what functions are held where - is critical if you are to maintain the same level of performance you can expect from a substantial investment in your own kit. Elements such as mail, archiving and CRM systems can all live happily in the cloud, but cloud hosting of performance-related functions such as ERP, which demands heavy computing power, is too risky for most businesses.

Until the technology matures, the majority of solutions will involve balancing the risk. For instance creating a public and private cloud hybrid incorporating an element of server and desktop virtualisation, then hosting the solution at a data centre, and using cloud to deliver access to the business’s own systems.

I hope we will move closer to the agreement of cloud standards so that all appliances are interoperable and providers line up alongside, rather than opposite each other. It’s essential to choose the right service provider, because at the moment it is difficult to switch, and it shouldn’t be.

Despite all the hype, cloud may not be the ideal solution for every business. But with its easy accessibility, fast delivery, and relatively low cost it will remain the fastest growing IT sector, and one that will result in huge benefits for businesses that understand how to use it wisely, and to competitive advantage.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Garry Sheriff .