Cloud computing – no more meal tickets
Jinfo Blog

16th May 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Enterprises are starting to give serious consideration to what might work in cloud computing and what probably won’t. Inevitably, perhaps, corporate IT heads are in the driving seat – but that doesn’t mean that information professionals need be forced to sit in the back. Having arguably reached the top of its hype cycle (see Jennifer Smith’s LiveWire posting at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e26680 for more on this) the cloud nevertheless presents plenty of potential opportunities. And a new Forbes Insight report offers some valuable clues. According to Seeding the Cloud: Enterprises Set Their Strategies for Cloud Computing (http://digbig.com/5bbpjk – registration required), the obstacles include concerns about security, about the cloud’s ability to handle legacy applications, and – significantly – about IT staff’s willingness to work in a new way and re-orient its priorities. But therein lie some opportunities – and perhaps some timely warnings too – for information professionals. Here’s one warning: enterprises remain more interested in private cloud than its public counterpart, with more than a third of the 235 senior IT professionals that Forbes surveyed saying they had no plans for public cloud computing. It’s not too long ago that two big names in the information business – Amazon and Autonomy – launched public cloud products, leading LiveWire to suggest that cloud computing was rapidly becoming both mainstream and commoditised (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e24000). Maybe we need to reconsider that view in the light of the Forbes finding. More encouragingly, though, eight out of ten of the Forbes respondents saw the cloud as being useful for data backup. This is the very service that the Autonomy offering (aimed primarily at law firms) set out to provide, and one that potentially plays to the strengths of information managers. Even better from infopros’ point of view, more than two-thirds of the Forbes respondents said that, with its roots in internet standards and internet style, the cloud could improve internal collaboration, as well as communication with business partners and suppliers. There’s already plenty of evidence of the opportunities that collaborative computing offers information managers and their staff – try http://www.vivavip.com/go/e25158 or http://www.vivavip.com/go/e26444 for instance. Security – particularly in the public cloud – remains a top concern for up to three quarters of the Forbes respondents. However, it’s hardly a new issue as far as information managers are concerned (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27391 for example) – and in any case, there’s a strong argument for saying that risk management is the business that infopros ought to be in (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e17539). ‘Some IT staffers regard the very idea of cloud computing as a threat – a move away from technologies or skills that may previously have been their meal tickets within the organization,’ the Forbes report concludes. One surely wouldn’t want to profit from someone else’s misfortune – but nobody’s meal ticket lasts for ever.

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