There’s still a lot of educational work to be done in working with Irish businesses to let them see what the particular advantage of cloud computing can be for their specific businesses.
There are many advantages we all hear about but in relation to specific business requirements, organisations need to see what those advantages are for their business. So what may work for one may not work for another.
Some of the greater advantages are cost savings from the cloud, ease of doing business, deploying new computing systems and applications for that business. And that is very true.
But one also has to look at the implications of change for those businesses. So whether cloud computing can deliver immediate advantages or not, that needs to be investigated on a business-by-business basis.
When developing a cloud strategy it is important look at the different opportunities that can come from the cloud, what are the advantages and then develop a strategy to apply them.
The unexpected benefits to businesses are the ease with which applying new applications can happen for that business. The benefits are often the ease of applying new business information applications.
Also, what the cloud allows you to do is decouple the management of underlying infrastructure for a business and therefore it frees up IT people to deliver business benefits to the company from the application of software rather than looking after the underlying IT infrastructure.
These are the advantages that will come as cloud is more applied in the organisation.
If you look at larger organisations, you are going to be talking about more complex infrastructure and probably more legacy applications and the diversity of changes that are being made to standard applications. When you make changes to standard applications, if you then look to apply a more standardised system, either in the cloud or on-premise, that’s where difficulties can arise.
Again it is down to analysing the requirement and putting proper planning on place.
For a smaller business it is possibly quicker because applications may be more standardised to move to the cloud. However, for larger organisations a more detailed plan will be required before you move to apply new systems.
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