I first moved to a cloud computing model for business 25 years ago. I guess that makes me an advocate. Cloud-based services are often now portrayed as the inevitable first choice for all types of business. It is understandable why. The benefits of moving to a cloud computing model are well-rehearsed.
Businesses must adapt to changing human behaviours in their market place if they are to remain relevant; increasingly those behaviours are influenced by access to devices that use cloud-based services. New IT products and services are increasingly, and often exclusively, cloud-based, and businesses must be there too or be left behind.
Then there are the advantages and choices that come with Enterprise-level computing available to all. Outsourcing to a professional service provider, a business can offload the work required to upgrade, monitor, secure, backup, and support inevitably complex and integrated IT systems 24x7x365, and provide users with access anytime and anywhere. All of this comes with the ability to scale up and down the use of IT, and therefore the cost, in line with business activity.
The case is made. I would however offer the following observations.
Cloud computing services constantly evolve, and the term increasingly covers a diverse range of solutions. What is the best model to adopt – public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud – or multi-cloud? The decision is no longer as simple as cloud or no cloud. Matching the needs of the business with the services on offer requires both a consistent level of knowledge and understanding within the business, and a service provider who is willing to engage genuinely in that type of discussion and commit to the outcome, rather than offer a take-it-or-leave-it menu of services.
This applies not just to delivering services that offer competitive advantage but also to ensuring, for example, compliance with regulatory requirements. Even in a cloud computing model there are shared responsibilities. How is data to be managed, for instance, and where are the gaps?
An often unsatisfactory component of the cloud computing model is the Service Level Agreement (SLA). Resolution times for both issues and service requests can be inconsistent with the needs of the business. If you have to send an email within the next 15 minutes, a fix or workaround within 4 hours doesn’t meet the requirement. At the same time, service providers cannot commit to SLAs which put them out of business. Having to refer to the SLA may indicate a need to improve the relationship with the service provider.
Finally, we come to cost. Are cloud-based services that much cheaper, a claim which is often made? When a certain cloud services provider unilaterally imposed significant price increases across the board it certainly felt like, to paraphrase Adam Smith, we were all accessing diamonds rather than water.
To arrive back at the beginning, I am firmly an advocate for cloud-based services; progressive and innovative – who wouldn’t want that description applied to their business? It is up to businesses to work closely with their service providers to ensure they get the IT their business needs and deserves.