Shedding light on a cloudy future
Jinfo Blog

15th June 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Scarcely a month seems to go by without another report reviewing the promises and perils posed by cloud computing. This time it’s the turn of the Pew Research Center and, as ever, much of the emphasis is on the hurdles to be overcome. Nevertheless, nearly three quarters of the expert respondents to Pew’s survey believe that, by 2020, people will be doing most of their work using internet based applications run from devices such as smart phones. This compares with just over a quarter who think that people will still mostly be using a general purpose PC, contending that small portable devices are just too fiddly for serious working. In fact, the messages coming out of The Future of Cloud Computing (http://digbig.com/5bbsrr) are mixed. Respondents observe that large businesses are far less likely to put most of their work ‘in the cloud’ any time soon because of control and security issues – yet there also seems to be general agreement that most people will neither know nor care whether they are working within their local device or in the cloud. Whatever the future holds, plenty of effort is being expended now on preparing decision makers for life in the cloud. A recent Forbes Insight report reviewed executives’ opinions on what might work in cloud computing and what probably wouldn’t (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29056), and now Gartner is warning of the need for organisations to re-evaluate the rationale for software as a service. SaaS will have a role in the future of IT, Gartner concludes – but not the dominant future that was first thought. Many of the bad practices that occurred in the on-premises world are now moving their way into SaaS, it warns, particularly ‘shelfware’ – paying for a software subscription that is not being accessed by an end user (http://digbig.com/5bbsrs). It’s a familiar concept to information managers, who constantly have to justify the cost of subscriptions in terms of the use made of them. They’re equally familiar with the opportunities and threats posed by outsourcing (see FreePint’s survey of a year ago for instance, purchase details at http://web.freepint.com/go/shop/report/1403) – and the cloud positively invites organisations to outsource. Cloud services will create over 300,000 jobs in India by 2015, according to Microsoft India, sharing the results recently of research from global management consultants Zinnov. To be sure, the announcement is designed to puff the Windows Azure platform – but it’s hard to dispute Microsoft’s assertion that India has the potential to emerge as the ‘global competency centre’ for cloud services (http://digbig.com/5bbsrt). So there are many cloudy messages here. Information managers will need to have balanced the pros and cons by the time bosses start taking irrevocable decisions that affect their services.

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