It’s shaping up as the next big thing –“cloud computing.” Until recently, we’d stored our information on hard drives and collaborated with colleagues via attachments and a confusing array of edits, highlights and multiple versions of the same document. In contrast, cloud computing moves all of that information – emails, documents, presentations, photos, spreadsheets and so on – onto the Internet where it exists in a virtual space which we refer to as ‘the cloud’.
By having all this information reside online, you instantly become more flexible, more productive and more collaborative in the way you do things. No servers to manage in-house or client software to be installed. Available anytime, anywhere, from any device connecting to the Internet. Businesses call it “Software as a Service,” or “SaaS”. For most people, it’s just the web. Whatever you want to call it, a multiplicity of factors have converged to mean that cloud computing’s time has come.
What has changed? Well, broadband is reaching the point of ubiquity and the cost of storage has plummeted. But it’s the economic downturn which has made more businesses wake up to the promise of cloud computing. With the recession hitting home, every part of every business is under pressure to cut costs and the IT department is no exception.
The cloud has the potential to deliver big savings, improve asset utilisation and dramatically reduce up-front spend on traditional desktop software, servers, maintenance and support. Instead of running these in-house, you ‘rent’ applications from a third party, turning capital expenditure into operational expenditure. One of our customers calculated that Google cloud services cost them $70 per year per user as opposed to $300 for a traditional desktop offering.
It also transfers the responsibility for ‘keeping the lights on’ – an all too familiar headache for CIOs – to the cloud computing provider. Then there’s the pace of innovation that the cloud makes possible – last year, we brought over 140 new features and applications to Google Apps. Cloud computing presents us with the opportunity to build a new generation of applications which deliver a much faster innovation cycle for IT and integrate information in a way which simply wasn’t possible before.
However, drivers beyond cost are behind the revolutionary move to an online world. The nature of the workplace is changing. In general, workforces are more mobile and more geographically dispersed than ever before and IT has to respond to that. Web-based applications make for powerful collaboration in real time: accessing the same documents, communicating online, ending the need for numerous email attachments and version control issues… addressing a dozen small pain points that add up to many wasted work hours for each and every member of staff.
We sometimes get asked why Google, a consumer-focused company, is involved in bringing the potential of the cloud to the business world. The answer is straightforward: consumer applications are evolving much faster than business software. It used to be that you got the best technology at work. Now the tools we have in our personal lives are much better – think of the iPhone, or your 7 GB Gmail inbox compared to your 500 MB inbox at work where you’re constantly deleting emails to free up space. Employees are consumers too, and they now expect – and in many cases demand – the same ease of use at work and flexibility of access as they have with applications in their personal lives.
Inevitably, some people have reservations about the cloud. The biggest challenge to the cloud is the resistance to change – anything which represents a fundamental shift in the way things are done is going to take time to understand. Indeed, there remains some notable misconceptions out there about the risks, like system security and reliability. Software security should always be a concern when discussing critical business data, wherever it’s kept. In many ways, cloud computing can be more secure than hosting data yourself. For example, it generally takes 30-60 days for businesses to patch a vulnerability in their own computer systems. During that time, the corporation’s IT infrastructure is at risk. With the scale of cloud computing, we can fix everything quickly and ensure their infrastructure is safe.
As with many revolutions, the economics of cloud computing are driving the shift away from the old order and may ensure the most enduring change. Each day, more and more companies entrust their data to the cloud. Robert Kennedy once said that “… if our times are difficult and perplexing, so are they challenging and filled with opportunity.” The opportunity for cloud computing is now – it simply makes good economic and business sense. IT departments can either batten down the hatches or they can innovate and set themselves up for when things start to improve. For IT decision-makers under pressure to deliver cost savings and focus on increasing revenues now is the time to consider how the cloud can help.
