Forum: What Don't Companies Get about Cloud?

Recently participated in a forum thread from our friends at eBizQ: "What do companies still not get about Cloud Computing?"

A lot of this uncertainty stems from the old stalwarts of "Is the Cloud secure? Is it scalable?" -- and I think the panelists here debunk those fears pretty well. There are many well-secured ways to take advantage of Cloud, with almost unlimited scalability -- a lot more effort has been put into that at the big public cloud providers than most companies' own web and firewall strategies.

Now, let's get down to SLAs, or service level agreements in the public Cloud - many of which are starting to improve dramatically, while most still pretty much disavow responsibility for interruptions and downtime. Caveat emptor.

That said, Cloud is already happening, and is still going to happen - there is no way to escape the business appeal of provisioning IT resources and software in an on-demand basis. We are seeing many of the world's biggest customers first pooling resources within their own enterprise and rapidly obtaining a Private cloud, while thinking of Public cloud only for the highest capacity or "edges" of their applications.

Here was my take on this topic - read more at http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/ebizq_forum/2011/08/what-do-companies-still-not-get-about-cloud-computing.php:

"Yeah we gotta do it. But who owns it, and who buys it?" Cloud as a term can cover so many departments and responsibilities within an enterprise.

Is it general corporate IT infrastructure (stuff like shared drives, backups, security & email)? Or is it the company's revenue-driving edge where business functionality is developed and delivered to partners and customers (commerce and differentiated service offerings)?

Often we are seeing larger companies with a more innovative bent hiring a "Cloud Czar" type executive or guru -- with a responsibility to overlay multiple organizations and map out a Cloud strategy. It's not always optimal, but at least then you have someone looking at the bigger picture.

Anyway, we recently had a great little meeting of the minds with some of our customers on this particular Cloud topic as well as the "Czars" and front-line job skills and talent pool of the future in our industry, so look for more interesting material on that coming soon.