So, 'cloud' is the answer to all our business dreams or at least that's what the technology press, integrators, small business journals, the world, his wife and their dog are telling us, but is that really the case? Well I think the answer to that question is 'yes' and 'no'...
So what is the true benefit of cloud? In short, low capital expenditure, quick time to implementation, flexible terms and no tie in to long contracts, all of which makes 'cloud' a great option for small to medium (and larger) sized businesses. Pre-cloud, technology had to be a tangible asset, a box or boxes that sat in a room and hummed and created heat. Not only was it something that you could touch and feel, you had to feed it on a regular basis with patches, updates and general prodding along and unless you had a technology minded employee, you could only achieve this by outsourcing this responsibility to an integrator that understood 'the beast'. Due to all of the love and attention you had to heap on your technology, the on-going cost could be large or unpredictable or both.
So cloud removes all of this uncertainty? Well yes, to an extent it does. In the nature of free enterprise, myriad developers are focussing on creating hosted services that offer very viable alternatives to shrink-wrapped Microsoft, Symantec, Adobe etc. products, that allow you to enter your credit card details and be up and running in minutes and if I'm honest, most of them are a great alternative to spending hundreds on commercial products. It takes away the headache of having to manage an infrastructure just to be able to have access to the systems you need to manage your business and for once, small companies can work just like big ones and as long as you have a credit card and an Internet connection, you can build your empire from your garage, your bedroom or wherever else takes your fancy.
There has to be a downside, right? I'm not sure that downside is the right term, but there may be compromises to be made. The great benefit of having a product that is designed and built from the ground up by the likes of Microsoft, Apple, Adobe or Symantec is that there is a consistency across applications. Microsoft applications for example, allow you to move objects or data between whatever application you are using. You want a Spreadsheet in your document? No problem! You want an Access Database to feed your mail-merge? No problem! You want to integrate Microsoft Dynamics with Office? No problem! So there is a consistency of data flow and format, totally independent of the application you are using. This even works, to a certain extent, across vendors allowing me to save a Word document as a PDF and to save a PDF as a Word document. Data becomes flexible, but that flexibility comes at a cost.
Do cloud services provide this as well? In some cases yes, but I think that due to the fact that hosted applications can now pop up out of nowhere, with the design being driven purely by enthusiasm and the desire to become 'published', there is no control or standards and as a result, it leads to a fairly disjointed environment in the cloud where the individual elements fulfil your business needs, but the manual 'glue' needed to tie them all together degrades the offering as well as the benefits of the format... As an example, just recently Etonbridge was looking at adding business processes to improve customer service and reduce lost opportunities. We were looking specifically at upgraded CRM, Helpdesk and Time Tracking services and despite spending an afternoon scouring the Internet, we could find services that integrated, but that didn't synchronise leading to a very 'arm's length' arrangement of manual data entry to make it work. The only cloud services we did find that offered a 'complete' solution were cost prohibitive, most of which ironically started out in life as low cost alternatives to the big vendors. The cynic in me does wonder if the lure of market share and larger profits is too much to resist once a company gains traction with a decent client base and regular revenue...
In summary, are cloud services good? In short, yes, I think they are very good. At the very least, they have forced the big vendors to stop being complacent and to look at alternatives to traditional formats in order to satisfy customers that suddenly have a viable choice. Are they a viable alternative? Yes, I think they are, but you have to remember the old adage "you get what you pay for" and in most cases, I think this is true in the cloud. Should they be considered for your business? Most definitely, but they're not Nirvana, not yet anyway, but I do hope that in the future there is more of a focus on collaboration so that companies can pick and choose the cloud modules they need, safe in the knowledge that their life will be easier and simpler.
No comments:
Post a Comment