Cloud computing takes advantage of the economies of scale across multiple organisations.
"The benefits of economies of scale are real in any business and can be interpreted as bulk buying of resources and solutions," says Jonathan Kropf, CEO and co-founder of Cloud on Demand, commenting on the results of the ITWeb/Cloud on Demand Cloud Computing Survey, which ran online for 14 days during August and September.
The majority of survey respondents (71%) did not view cloud as a hype that has little or no value to their organisations.
"Different companies will have different uses for cloud services. Pick the solutions that make sense to move to the cloud and engage your technology partners to assist you in the process," he advises.
When deciding what applications to move into the cloud, it emerged from the survey that e-mail was the first choice, at 12%; CRM came second, at 11%, and PBX was ranked third, at 8%.
"I am not surprised e-mail was selected," says Kropf. "It is an easy win. The move to cloud involves minimal to no downtime for a company, and it frees up IT to focus on business needs. E-mail has become like electricity. When you flick the light switch, you care that the light comes on. You are not thinking about how it got to you or the method of power generation. E-mail is the same. It has become a critical service but, ultimately, you just want to send and receive an e-mail."
According to Kropf, moving to the cloud is about planning and looking at the applications and business processes that will have an immediate benefit, with minimal business impact, in the transition. "E-mail and backup are always the logical starting points. The key though is to choose a platform and partner that can assist with creating a cloud platform that is not just about single-point servers or applications."
He adds that a key component is also ensuring business is able to move workloads and applications back on-premise in the future, if business needs change. For Kropf, this means looking at vendors that use standard technologies.
According to the survey results, a large number of survey respondents (82%) said they see cloud as an enabler for optimising IT operations, while a mere 6% said they do not view cloud as such, and 12% were unsure.
"Cloud is about automation, agility, flexibility and scalability. When IT is able to adapt to business needs quickly, without having to go through protracted procurement and deployment cycles, it allows them to focus on adding business value and at the pace that business demands these days," Kopf said.
Fifty-nine percent of survey respondents are investigating how to enable a private cloud for their organisations; only 16% said their organisations are not doing so.
"Don't look at private cloud as virtualisation. Private cloud is about automation, flexibility and scalability," Kropf notes, adding that he believes few organisations have the ability and resources to truly implement a private cloud, especially in the mid-market space. Instead, hybrid cloud is a way to get the scalability and flexibility, but still maintain the control that organisations want.
"According to the IDC, spend on public cloud-delivered IT services by 2016 will be $98 billion. The hype is gone; the reality of cloud is here and it is growing in acceptance and use," Kopf concludes.
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