Friday Thought: Comfort with the Cloud Grows Rapidly Among Business Execs
As reported by Dow Jones via Fox Business News back in May, IBM published results of a bi-annual survey of more than 3000 CIOs. The results indicate that adoption of cloud computing will continue to grow rapidly. Over the past two years:
- The number of CIOs planning to use c loud computing has jumped from 33% to 60%
- The number of CIOs stating that cloud computing is a top priority has jumped from about 33% to about 70%
What does this mean for you beyond “cloud computing is not going away”?
- Mid-market and large enterprises will continue to demand enterprise-class features and capabilities from cloud computing solutions
- PAR (performance/availability/reliability) concerns will continue to be addressed by vendors
- Security architectures will continue to evolve to meet market demands.
Small and Mid-Size Businesses (SMBs) will benefit from the continuing, rapid evolution of cloud solutions. As demonstrated by Google’s increasing rate of feature releases in Google Apps, evolution will rapidly close the gap between new, cloud solutions and traditional in-house systems.
SMBs should expect to re-evaluate current vendors and IT partners against new players in the market. Avoid letting inertia keep your business on a path without fully exploring options. Change may mean moving away from vendors uncomfortable with the growing role of cloud solutions.
At the same time, avoid moving to cloud solutions for the sake of being in the cloud. Businesses should always map business objectives into IT initiatives and priorities, and then select the best solution.
