Take the Leap of Cloud Faith
Posted by Jim Flack on July 12, 2011
I was a big fan of the 90’s comedy sitcom “Wings” where the Hackett brothers operated a small airline in New England. In one episode, Joe Hackett and his wife, Helen, lose all of their possessions in a house fire. Upon receiving the insurance money, Helen attends an auction and goes on a bidding spree. When Joe finally confronts her, she admits she just wanted to buy stuff and gain back control over her life, because with the fire, all of her stuff and her control vanished in an instant.
We all feel the need sometimes to have our “stuff” close to keep it safe and maintain control of our environment. But usually we realize that stuff is not what makes us human or makes our lives interesting, but rather it’s the relationships and the lives we lead that are important.
This can be analogized to the cloud. Many IT managers and CIO’s want their “stuff” – in this case hardware, software and IT staff, physically near them and under their control. Making the leap of faith to the cloud can represent giving up all that stuff to a place where it no longer is occupying physical space within the IT department—and therefore a lack of control. Add an outsourced model, where a cloud solution is also managed by external services professionals, and it’s hard for IT to let go.
Some of the concern with the cloud is around security. Literally on a day-to-day basis, best practices are being developed and implemented by leading cloud vendors, consortium, and R&D groups to address those concerns. In a public or community cloud, you are able to leverage this industry-leading security, because everyone in that ecosystem gains the benefit of the overall investment. In fact, few companies can afford to achieve the level of cloud security provided by the best cloud vendors. In reality, the risk of security breaches is no greater or less than those of on-site physical data servers and networks.
Cloud-based business solutions do not have to involve uploading the mass sum of a company’s data and the elimination of on-site systems. Instead, the cloud should and can extend your legacy infrastructure and augment current capability. Take the case of B2B cloud integration, where you are extending processes and applications across the cloud to integrate faster and more easily with other systems and protocols. As a result, companies communicate in real time with suppliers and customers, streamline and automate processes, develop customer retention and loyalty and increase company revenue. Plus, there is significant cost savings in the maintenance of on-site systems and much greater transparency into where and how data is being processed.
This kind of paradigm shift takes time and no company should suddenly make the leap to the cloud without the proper due diligence or planning. At Hubspan, we provide managed services to address each and every contingency and concern to make transitions like this seamless. And as companies realize how much they are saving in resources and IT costs, they may wonder what took them so long to make that important first step. And of course, we provide Web-based reporting and analytic tools, so you can still feel like you have control over your “stuff”.
Tags: B2B cloud platform, B2B Integration, Cloud Computing, Cloud Security
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