Reasons that Keep CIO's away from public Clouds

For a while I have been thinking why should some of the CIO's in spite of understanding the advantages of the mammoth concept of Cloud computing say "No" or take a wait and watch position on Public clouds. Most of them accept the fact that the public cloud is one form which can very well support the enterprises on its overall economic goals. Beyond the cost aspect they are clearly aware of the innovation capabilities that a cloud computing platform can provide and thereby increasing their reach to their end customers or consumers multifold. Still there are strong reasons for them to keep away. The predominant ones what i believe are

1. Data relocation

2. Data Ownership

3. Vendor lock in

4. Loss of control of infrastructure

5. And finally Legitimate contracts

Clouds in general may be sleeping giants of climate change - true ?

I was listening to one of the documentaries on "Thunderheads" where a daring group of scientists tries to catch the Perfect storm across Darwin in Australia. International cloud experiment is what they call themselves. During their research they realize that clouds are indeed sleeping giants and they have ability to trap heat and reflect sunlight back into space.

So how is this related to our cloud in the whole cloud computing space? I believe that cloud computing is a sleeping giant and organizations are yet to realize the potential of the same. Once it’s unearthed it’s beyond doubt going to change the rules of Information technology. If the demand heats up will the cloud coverage change? That is the question which most of us simply don’t know but part of the answer lies with the enterprises or large organizations and cloud vendors as they are the clouds that make the cloud. Going forward it’s going to be collaboration amongst all of them which will keep the cloud sparkly.

Can public cloud dominate the Enterprise space ?

In most of the conversations what i have with my colleagues on the various cloud delivery models for enterprises, public cloud adoption seems to be the most debated. While we all agree to the fact that nothing you build internally can match the economies of scale and reach the skepticism pops up around the challenges for its adoption. Security being the primary one followed by the lack of standards and committed service levels. The debate that private cloud adoption will be the mainstream within enterprises by embracing the technology behind the public cloud i strongly believe that there is no reason why not to choose Public cloud instead. The simple reason behind the belief is that the talent tap that comes from the public cloud, the consumer base and solution variety will become irresistible for enterprises and before we see any big difference in the way it exists today adoption would have already happened.

While affordability will draw more and more minds to innovate new markets will be created and public clouds will become the mainstream reach to the end customers for enterprises. The modes of usage will be refined based on the business line but majority over the private is not so far.

Cloud Computing – Will organizations adopt to Save money ?

Organizations are pondering around the buzz word of cloud computing and technology behind the same with the de facto offer of cost savings build into the model. While new technology has been a tool to optimize and streamline the overall IT operations, its being heavily looked upon to cut costs and hence very less cutting back on the new technology uptake.

Most CIO's considers their internal IT systems to be too expensive but still considers themselves early adopters of technology. Its clear that the adoption is primarily driven with the motive to cut costs. There is a strong belief among the CIO's that cloud computing as a new technology can help them bring in a positive impact on the bottom line by bringing in a controlled outflow on recurring costs and lower upfront costs. Given the fact that cost savings are a possibility the adoption of these technology with full force is yet to happen. There was a strong reluctance due to the turbulent economic times and now with the change in the scenario adoption and switch will begin.

Innovation - Changing Paradigm, Keeps the prices on check

Innovation is rapidly being challenged in the cloud computing world. The space is still work in progress and will continue to be in the state for ever. This in fact is challenging the leading players like Microsoft, Google, Amazon to regularly update their product suits and offerings to differentiate among ts others. As these companies are throwing everything into this ring the competition is getting tougher day by day. The outcome of this is certainly benefiting the end customers who is consuming these services. The offer prices are being challenged to core and is going down to enable each of them to fight for the market share.

Cloud computing - Convergence map of conventional and cloud delivery options

Compelling reasons for Enterprises to adopt cloud computing

Enterprise IT is hunting innovative ideas to be a part of their strategy to be responsive to business to stay competitive. Over the last decade business expectations has been increasing multifold without exponential increase in the IT budget. The economic downturn has now started putting pressure on top of this to do more for less and fast. Time to value for each dollar spends along with the initial Capex and Opex is being a measure on all IT initiatives across Enterprises. Conventional ways of optimizing the existing IT systems and teams are hitting the threshold and it’s time for new innovative ways to build and deploy IT infrastructure and applications across enterprises.

Cloud computing is clearly emerging as the alternate way for a faster cost-effective and scalable way of changing IT to respond to the business needs. For those enterprise who are still considering the adoption let’s look at 3 most compelling reasons on how cloud computing can help them transform their IT.

1. Flexible pricing models – Buy versus Build.
2. Faster Time to Market
3. Take advantage of the latest technology

The flexibility in pricing models provided by the cloud computing vendors really stands out as one of the biggest reasons for enterprises to think about adoption. With the subscription based pricing models enterprises have the flexibility of starting new transformational projects with zero capital investments. These also provide options to start slow (to be risk averse) and then scale instantly or gradually based on the business needs. You have the options of winding up some of the initiatives without incurring the financial risk on the large capital investments for technology and infrastructure which you might have incurred if you were to build.

Faster time to market always keeps you ahead of the competition. The delays induced into the traditional project development lifecycle can be significantly reduced by adopting the various delivery options of cloud computing. Deploying applications across the globe is now as easy as scaling up the applications. There are wide varieties of options to get pre built application / platform / Infrastructure environments with service levels defined based on your business criticality requirements. The actual development time now can get reduced to define/customize the business logic / Data modeling and User interface.

Platform and OS sunset has been worrying the enterprises which eats up a lot of IT budget in terms of maintenance and support. The cloud computing environment takes advantage of the latest and greatest technology foundation where flexibility is built into automatic upgrades of layers without any impact, to quickly adapt to the latest technology shifts or roadmaps. The options of a subscription model to platforms and technology really takes away this burden from enterprises and helps them to focus on building application functionality to delivery more business value and leave the operations, maintenance, support upgrade etc to the cloud computing vendors.

Today’s market is highly dynamic and demands greater flexibility and agility being build into the Enterprise IT environment to support.