10 Trenchant Insights into Cloud Services Adoption

by Chris Preimesberger

Verizon Communications, which has had the physical setup for online data storage for a long while, finally joined the cloud storage services crowd June 15 by introducing its own branded enterprise offering.

IBM’s cloud-based business analytics service, Blue Insight, has only been out for a few months yet already has 109,000 users and is projected to hit 200,000 within the next 12 months.

“The cloud, for us, is just another way to outsource,” said Alan Boehme, senior vice president of IT Strategy and Enterprise Architecture at insurance services provider ING.

A snapshot poll of Cloud Leadership Forum attendees reported that 40 percent believe security is the biggest unsolved issue with cloud computing. Other major issues include vendor lock-in (26 percent) and cost (24 percent).

Tickets.com, which supplies the cloud infrastructure for half of Major League Baseball’s online ticketing apparatus, is building a new cloud application that will enable Facebook users and their friends to join up and obtain tickets to baseball games and other events without leaving their Facebook pages. “We want to capture people wherever they are when they’re ready to buy,” said John Rizzi, vice president of Product Management and Strategy.

“I need to learn a lot more about business and get away from the IT details,” Jessica Carroll, managing director of Information Technologies for the United States Golf Association. She was talking about the new skill sets that IT managers need when bringing in cloud services.

“Forty percent of the U.S. Navy’s IT costs are in storage alone,” said Capt. Nicholas V. Buck, former director, Ground Mission Framework and Services Program, National Reconnaissance Office, U.S. Navy. Buck was in charge of all satellite-related data and video content for several years.

A poll of CIOs/CTOs taken by IDG researchers found that the No. 1 demand that enterprise CIOs made to their IT staff was: “Speed it up.” The No. 6 comment on the list was: “You’re doing great.”

IDG research shows that enterprises now spend an average of 14 percent of their budgets on cloud-related services and/or infrastructure. By 2013, IDG said, that number will be 20 percent or more.

“MRIs generally weigh in at between 35MB and 40MB in digital size, are usually looked at only once and need to be kept for seven years to satisfy HIPAA regulations. That’s a lot of content to keep on hand for a long, long time. So put it all in the cloud,” said Erich Clementi, IBM vice president, Strategy and General Manager, Enterprise Initiatives, IBM.