A Quick Cloud Prod

What exactly is the mental/cultural/political barrier for adoption of cloud computing and SaaS-based solutions?

It should no longer be technical barriers – nor cost – nor reliability – so what’s the disconnect?

Think about it…

Most companies do not own and manage (without third party suppliers/partners – the “analog” to cloud services):

• Their own phone company/network
• Their energy generation
• Their own internet service
• Their own shipping service
• All of their legal needs
• All payroll processing
• Insurance needs
• Marketing (Display advertising of all kinds, especially)

And the list could easily go on (please, feel free to add your own examples in the comments)…

Hint: You Are Already Partly Virtual!

So what do organizations *really* have to lose with letting go of control to put content/computing into the cloud?

A massive percentage of business activities have already been handed over/outsourced to a variety of other services/participants – so what makes the final conceptual leap to move into the cloud so difficult?

• Fear of saving money?
• Fear of delivering too quickly?
• Fear of too much flexibility?

Probably not…

• Fear of lack of skills to jump into a virtualized world? Perhaps.
• Worries about “hackers” and PCI compliance? It’s not necessarily more risky to hire someone else to shoulder that burden than to handle yourself (and I could recommend some penetration testers that will likely prove that you aren’t as secure as you believe).
• Concerns about ability to integrate to “non-cloud” applications/systems? Possible – but there are options for nearly any scenario.

For 2011 – What’s Your Cloud Strategy?

If you’ve run into barriers for cloud usage, or (perhaps) *you* (or your boss) are the barrier to cloud usage in your organization – what are you going to do to experiment with the cloud and validate whether the cloud concerns are real?

Comment below – let’s see what we can do to help others who may have run into similar issues.

Remember the watch phrase I’ve started talking about recently?

Distributed Convergence – what are you doing to take advantage of the strengths and opportunities of Distributed Convergence?

Cloud computing, cloud storage, cloud collaboration, cloud applications, cloud integration – all very real, solvable now, and getting better, faster, cheaper, more manageable every day.

The cloud plays a very real role here – are you ready?