I spent two days last week at the Cloud Computing World Forum at Olympia. I am grateful to David Terrar for arranging for me to chair two panel sessions.
Although the exhibition stands at the conference were heavily biased to the technical side of the cloud (I must confess to having asked one exhibitor what his company did. 10 minutes later after a somewhat detailed explanation, I was none the wiser!) it was fascinating to see so many well established companies that specialised in Cloud technology – and some of these companies were major corporations, not by any means enthusiastic start ups.
The conference itself was very well attended with many hundreds attending the sessions on each of the three days and the headline and panel sessions were illuminating. Some of the highlights for me were:
- Currently $8 out of every $10 spent on IT is on infrastructure
- By 2012 20% of companies will not own their own IT assets but will use hosted or Cloud solutions
- Google have 2 million business users using their Google Apps
- Jaguar saved £2 million annually by moving their 17,000 employees from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps
- The City of Westminster Council is planning to be IT infrastructure free (doing everything in the Cloud) by 2015
The above is just a very small selection of the issues that were discussed – but take a few moments to digest these. They are not insignificant points. The City of Westminster moving its whole IT process into the Cloud is no small thing. Many corporations would be delighted to save IT costs by a relatively straight forward move to Google Apps. All of these are major statements and not what you might expect of a topic of which most IT users are still woefully ignorant.
Security was of course an issue that was discussed at some length – but the overriding conclusion was that the issue was very much one of perception than of reality. As one speaker said – many firms and businesses are quite adamant that they would not be prepared to store their email record in a Cloud Solution – all very well but they have no issue about sending confidential matters by email in the first place!
The overriding message was that the Cloud is a journey and that more and more businesses and organisations – large and small are embarking on it. To those sceptics out there – there is a whole parallel universe in the Cloud and its growing!
Thanks for this. It has kicked me into life to do something about Google Apps.
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