Insight Business Change in the Cloud

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There were three excellent presentations at yesterday's seminar Business Change in the Cloud, and an interesting question and answer session. Summary notes and the presentation slides are:

Using The Cloud to “Fast-Start” Organisations

Chris Jones – Transformational Consultant – summarised some of the insights he has gained over the last few years of deploying Cloud services at a number of organisations including Remploy and Big Society Capital.

Whilst Chris Jones was CIO at Remploy, many legacy IT services were moved to the Cloud. One of the learning points from this experience is that many of the challenges are change management challenges – of staff adapting to the new services – rather than IT challenges.

Big Society Capital has been able to use an entirely Cloud-based approach to set up the main services for the company – HR, Payroll, Accounting, email, phones, etc. This allowed the organisation to launch rapidly, something that would have taken several months with a non-Cloud approach.

Chris described the Cloud as the equivalent of the industrial revolution for IT – commoditising services through using standard Cloud services, rather than hand crafting systems. This changes the emphasis of IT to buying services rather than “building boxes” and the main questions that need to be asked are no longer “how do I build this box?”, but “how do I utilise this service and interface it to my other services?”

A good example is that Google Mail (Gmail) is a commodity email service available worldwide across all devices. Contrast setting up in-house email – buying a server, waiting for it to be delivered, setting it up, installing the software, rolling out email, something that can easily take several weeks (and then only taking a fraction of the CPU time available on the server) … Gmail can be deployed in a few minutes.

Chris Jones said that some complexities are still there, particularly with getting different services to work together.

Chris concluded by saying “the cloud presents a spectacular opportunity for SMEs that have brave leaders”.

Business in The Cloud

Mike Seery – Head of Digital at Which? – talked about his own experience of using cloud within large media organisations such as The Telegraph, Which? and The Economist, to explain the rewards and challenges that cloud technologies offer organisations.

Mike Seery’s talk centred around what he described as the seven benefits of the Cloud:

1. Cost – there is zero start-up cost, no need for capital expenditure and the ability, with many of the Cloud services, to pay for use, rather than pay for availability.

2. Flexible Capacity – to easily and virtually instantaneously add or remove capacity.

3. Agility – to rapidly deploy new services (such as the Gmail example above).

4. Scalability – a great example of this is Comic Relief, who use the Cloud to provide the scale they need for just a few days a year, only paying for this capacity when it is needed.

5. Resilience – although there have been a few well publicised breaks in service, the facts are that key statistics for the cloud, such as availability, are orders of magnitude better than owned system. Added to this, when any occasional issues do crop up, the level of expertise available to fix the problems and response times are significantly better than for owned systems.

6. Security – generally, Cloud service providers are better protected than in-house systems and it is something of a myth that in-house systems are not vulnerable. The facts that major regulated companies such as GSK and the Spanish bank BBVA have deployed significant Cloud services; Microsoft and Google-based respectively.

7. Green – because Cloud services can be adjusted and scaled on the fly, their suppliers are able to get much higher utilisation than owned systems. Many of their data centres are also built with the environment in mind, not least because savings in energy are savings in costs.

Mike’s advice was:

• “Where possible, just use cloud services out of the box – don’t customise. For example, use the Gmail web email, rather than using it through Outlook”. And there is little point trying to change the approach the likes of Google are taking - just go with it (as long as it is suitable for your business).
• Different skills are needed for managing a Cloud-based approach, compared with in-house IT.
• Look at what others have done and get advice to ensure you choose the right approach for your organisation’s needs.

Cloud: What’s Coming Next

Carlos Rego – Chief Visionary Officer of OnApp, a software development house specializing in next generation hosting technology – gave his vision (as befits his job title) of what the next developments are likely to be for the Cloud and the impact this will have on businesses and the way we all use IT.

Carlos set the scene by looking at trends:

• By 2014, there will be more computing taking place in Cloud datacentres than in traditional datacentres.
• Currently, there is 66% compound annual growth in global Cloud traffic.
• Cloud computing is becoming more and more ubiquitous – nearly everyone uses cloud computing in some form (Gmail and Facebook for example) and Cloud-based gaming services are becoming popular.

The drivers for this growth are the consumerisation of IT, the proliferation of devices, increasing globalisation and ubiquitous bandwidth and connectivity.

Carlos Rego’s vision is that:

• Over time, the entirety of IT will be outsourced to the Cloud, in the same way that power generation is.
• The future is federated services, to provide “completely fluid computing capacity, available wherever users are”.

The Cloud is just the next version of the internet – whereas the internet was originally mainly about documents, the cloud will be about all of your data and all of your applications.

There are steps that need to be taken in moving to this vision – there is a need for open interoperability standards for example (some existing Cloud platforms, such as the Amazon cloud, take a very proprietary approach). But what looks to the user to be a revolution, is in reality, an evolution.

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