Cloud: Eyes wide open
February 10th 2014
Cloud Computing article entitled ‘Cloud : Eyes wide open’, published in the Sunday Business Post on 02/01/2014
Ian Campbell reports
Words like 'caution and 'careful are peppered in John Bergin's conversation about the cloud. The managing director of IT Force believes that the sheer pace of change makes it difficult for anyone to predict where the market is heading.
'It's an evolving scenario for everyone from Microsoft and Amazon to companies like ours. The one thing you can say for certain is that some of what's here now won't around be in two years time, he said.
Advising clients to carefully consider their options, IT Force sees most cloud activity occur when businesses reach a point in their investment cycle when they need an upgrade. 'People faced with the choices of having to spend more money on upgrading kit will be more inclined to go the cloud whereas somebody who has systems that are working well will be in less of a hurry, he said.
The challenges for companies that choose to stick is that they might miss out on cloud benefits - the new agility that highly scalable platforms facilitate. 'It has become nearly as risky to make onsite investments if your competitors are using the cloud, he said.
For IT Force, the principal of managed services may stay the same with the cloud but day-to-day tasks have changed. Where once it was about managing and monitoring a client's on-site servers over a secure VPN, it's now about using VPNs to access a data centre where the servers are hosted for the client.
'The actual management process is different, he said. 'You are looking at power resilience and communications infrastructure - but the real beauty is the new flexibility. You can turn up memory and processor speeds as the client needs and then turn it back down when they're done.
Whatever about the change on the side of the service provider, Bergin stresses the importance making the cloud transition a smooth one for clients. 'They need to have their eyes wide open and understand what it requires, he said, highlighting testing and training as obligatory stepping-stones.
Training is about making sure all users are brought along on the journey. IT Force recommends starting with a small pilot project to iron out any problems and gain some user buy-in. 'A lot of companies miss this stage. You have to bring all users through the change process, not just one central management figure like the financial controller, he said.
Some cloud challenges are beyond the client's control and businesses need to be aware of the risks. A case in point is a public cloud service provider that decides to tweak its software without any consultation with subscribers.
'You could be working on bespoke software around Office 365, for example, when Microsoft decides to make an upgrade. You might find yourself with workflow that no longer works and there's nothing you can do about it, he warned.
It's precisely this kind of confusion that gives firms like IT Force a role in the new IT paradigm - or as Bergin put it: 'While the vendors are killing each other and making promises they can't always keep, we're on the ground catching the flack and making it work.
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