Fluffy logic: the future lies in "the cloud", according to IT experts. Scott Payton finds out what this means for businesses.
| Author | Payton, Scott |
All of the major business system vendors are touting cloud computing as the Next Big Thing. "As a basis for technology provision, the cloud is here to stay," says Dave Coplin, national technology officer at Microsoft. " In three to five years it will be ubiquitous."
In deed, research house Gartner forecasts that 20 per cent of all businesses' e-mail systems will be "in the cloud" by 2012, while IBM predicts that the market for cloud computing will grow to $126bn in 2012 from $47bn in 2008.
"We are talking about a tectonic shift in IT that will make the change from mainframes to client-server architecture look pretty small in comparison," says Adrian Joseph, EMEA managing director at Google Enterprise.
Cloud computing is the process of accessing and using software remotely via the internet. It is a substitute for installing and running software on a company's own systems. Accessing software hosted remotely by a third party means the firm can "rent" applications on a subscription basis rather than paying for them in advance.
Andy Park, who rejoices in the job title "cloud lead" at IBM, explains that the concept is merely the latest stage in the ongoing development of web-based computing. "It's not a revolution; it's an evolution. In five years' time the buzzword will have changed to something else," he says.
Microsoft's Hotmail service is a relatively simple example of cloud computing. But a growing number of businesses are using the cloud for a far wider and more sophisticated range of processes. "We're now at the stage of moving more core systems to the cloud model," Park says.
It seems that the marketing hype may be justified, then, but how will businesses truly benefit from cloud computing?
"It makes far more sense to have hosted solutions," claims Piers Linney, joint CEO of Outsourcery, a company that offers a range of cloud-based services. If you rent the software you need via the internet, you don't need to maintain it on your own servers, which in turn means that there's less need to employ a big in-house IT team.
This approach also offers economies of scale, because thousands of firms can share data centres, according to Coplin. "If you have your own in-house data centre, we at Microsoft think that the monthly costs to you are 100x, with 'x' being the cost per user," he says. "Using the public cloud, your monthly costs would be 50x or maybe even 25x."
Joseph cites the example of Small World Financial Services, a pan-European...
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