One of the greatest inhibitors to the growth of cloud computing in South Africa is that it is such a major shift in approach that local CIOs have tended to take an investigative attitude, followed by vacillation.
Traditional IT is, unfortunately, characterised by inflexibility.
Gareth James is solution strategist at CA Southern Africa.
South African companies do have a tendency to lag the US when it comes to adopting new technologies, so the fact that South Africans are just starting to see the first cloud computing proof of concept is not surprising to market watchers.
The International Data Group (IDG) “Enterprise Cloud Computing Study” found that on average, enterprises have allocated more than a third of their current IT budget spend on cloud computing. The sample size of 1 650 makes this analysis credible, but it remains a larger percentage of spend than most expected.
Cloud computing is most certainly real and is already here - in fact, if anything, the pace of adoption is accelerating. My advice would be to quickly grab a little project and test it using cloud computing, and here is my reasoning - two things are likely to happen if companies choose to ignore cloud: firstly, they will lose their edge; and secondly, they may lose control.
The edge
In business terms, cloud offers tremendous benefits with regards to agility and innovation. The former United States CIO - in the Obama administration - and renowned technology visionary, Vivek Kundra, cited efficiency, agility and innovation as just some of the advantages of cloud computing.
Traditional IT is an inhibitor to change. New products or projects are subjected to procurement and implementation delays. IBM was recently quoted saying that two-thirds of organisations fall behind when trying to implement new IT capabilities.
Imagine that companies could short-circuit the process by renting 'the compute' requirements - as it is commonly referred to in cloud industry circles - how much faster could they operate if their developers could work on parallel rather than shared systems? Adding a new feature or enhancing their service offering could be done in days rather than months.
Business agility is defined by Wikipedia as: “The ability of a business to adapt rapidly and cost-efficiently in response to changes in the business environment. Business agility can be upheld by maintaining and adapting goods and services to meet customer demands, adjusting to the changes in a business environment and taking advantage of human resources.”
Now, according to that definition, cloud computing should really be the poster child!
Cloud services can be ordered on demand, utilising user self-service, which means companies can very rapidly adopt or implement software to address a changing business environment. Cloud is an enabler for agile methodology, which means companies can constantly adjust their services to meet the customer demands.
I listened to a speech by futurist Graeme Codrington, where he spoke of “digital immigrants” - generation X and older, and “digital natives”, which he referred to as generation Y and younger. What struck me was how differently we view the world, and how expectations are changing. The new generation of consumers expect service delivery to be interactive and responsive. Cloud computing will help companies keep their edge as these demands continue to escalate.
Keeping control
Gregor Petri, a Gartner analyst, wrote an article: “Why cloud spells 'c.o.m.p.e.t.i.t.i.o.n.' for the average IT department”.
The question may be asked - how is it competition? Executives here and abroad are becoming increasingly aware that they have options and are simply using corporate credit cards to rent 'compute' for small projects. Before long, when a business unit is charged for software use, they will rent it from an external SaaS provider. Often, it is faster to order an application from a cloud service provider than it would be to requisition an application of similar functionality from internal IT.
Typical adoptions are targeted SaaS applications that serve a specific business purpose. A second application is that there are those who want to accelerate a project through the development and testing phases; here cloud computing is a very attractive option, 'compute' can be rented on demand at a reasonable rate. Traditional IT is, unfortunately, characterised by inflexibility - particularly with regard to the lead time required to create a test environment; this can take weeks or even months. The process can be even longer and more costly if new hardware must be acquired.
I heard recently of a consultant talking to a large financial institution. The manager explained that the company had eliminated the use of social networking during working hours, as it wasted valuable time. The consultant pointed out that he had walked past a large number of people using 3G cards on his way through the building! The staff had simply worked around the rule, which in turn, caused the network to be bridged at multiple places directly to the Internet - and all because of management's resistance to change.
The CIO who doesn't aid the adoption of cloud will effectively lose control of the information. Staff are financially incentivised on business outcomes and they will simply follow the path of least resistance in order to attain the desired result. A savvy CIO will either provide internal private clouds and/or act as a cloud broker so the company can operate as a conduit to cloud services.
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