Buying the Cloud for Cloud Sake is SO 2010
Posted by Margaret Dawson on January 11, 2011
Back in November, I made my prognostication of what we believe to be the top five cloud and integration predictions for 2011. Now that the New Year is here, let’s dig a little deeper into each of these predictions and shed some light on what we think is likely to happen in this year. Today, I’ll start with my first prediction – “companies will stop buying the cloud and start buying the solution.”
Buying the cloud, for cloud sake, was all the rage in 2010. Folks attended cloud-focused seminars and events, often looking for a silver bullet (or silver lining?) to their IT woes, which the cloud promised to bring. While I am a big fan of the cloud for completely selfish reasons, since Hubspan delivers a cloud integration platform, I am weary of cloud leading the conversation.
The good news is I truly believe this year the hype will die down and decision-makers will be more cloud savvy. The epiphany moment will come when they realize that the cloud is not a panacea for all challenges facing IT, but rather another way to consume technology – albeit a more cost effective, scalable one than the traditional on-premise consumption model.
With IT budgets on the rebound and most IT leaders saturated with cloud knowledge, decision makers will go back to basics and focus first on solving a business problem, then finding a good solution, whether that be cloud or otherwise.
Evaluating a cloud solution should be no different than evaluating a traditional on-premise solution. You should always be thinking about security, reliability, interoperability, proven technology and customer service amongst a laundry list of other things. If after evaluating each of these elements it turns out that a cloud solution fits the bill, then you can begin to factor in benefits such as a faster time to implementation, reduced capital expenditure, and easier management.
With fewer IT leaders pushing with the cloud, and instead leading with solving their business problems, many will be pleasantly surprised to find that a cloud solution is just what the doctor ordered. Folks will also have peace of mind knowing they went through the proper proof of concept process to solve their business issue, rather than just jumping on the cloud band wagon.
Tags: 2011 Predictions, Cloud Computing, Cloud-Based Platform, SaaS
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