Gareth williams, head of sales & strategy, verizon cloud (asia pacific), verizon enterprise solutions.
Gareth williams, head of sales & strategy, verizon cloud (asia pacific), verizon enterprise solutions.
"The cloud confers a new degree of elasticity onto businesses as they are now able to scale their processes up and down with far more agility than before."
Cloud services are increasingly becoming an inextricable part of doing business. How are they helping to transform businesses?
The cloud is not as debated as before. To quote Tiffani Bova, a Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, “The most disruptive thing in the market today is not technology, but rather the customer.” In this case, the customers are businesses who are looking to leverage cloud services to become more agile and productive. In a recent report by the Harvard Business Review, 40% of surveyed businesses said the cloud had increased their revenue.
Furthermore, massive amounts of data are collected daily from personal devices. All this data passes through the cloud and aggregates of data are increasingly being used to help companies make decisions on-the-fly. A good example is Uber, which uses data on user demand to implement surge pricing to accommodate high demand.
What barriers to adoption remain for the cloud and how should companies prepare for the shift online?
Businesses need to have robust infrastructure that is able to support the cloud. If the network isn’t good or fast enough, performance could be negatively affected, which would in turn be a drag on productivity. Enterprises need to examine the backbone of their infrastructure and ensure that it is ready for the cloud. Furthermore, all existing applications must be looked at to make sure that they are able to function on the cloud. A similar approach must also be applied to transactions to check that they are governed in a way that would work on the cloud.
As the cloud gains acceptance, what are some of the new challenges businesses will face?
There will always be the issue of lack of control for IT departments, especially compared to the pre-cloud era. The cloud gives rise to something called shadow IT, which is hardware or software that isn’t explicitly supported by the company’s IT department. The use of third-party cloud service providers contributes to this problem, but as the cloud has become more ubiquitous, the problem is not as serious as it used to be. Then there’s the problem of managing – and revoking – employee access to company data. In the past, an outgoing employee simply had to return company hardware, like their issued laptop. However, with cloud access now possible on personal devices, it has become more complicated to ensure that access has been cleanly terminated.
How do you think the use of cloud services will evolve?
Moving forward to 2016, I think we will see the rise of the industry-community cloud. This means specific cloud services for different industries like finance and media. Requirements vary from industry to industry so cloud services will become increasingly specific to the user. For instance, the energy industry cloud often deals with huge volumes of data which must be delivered to the right place at the right time, so cloud services in the area will be designed to do just that. More and more businesses will also begin to use not just one, but multiple, cloud services. This multi-cloud strategy dovetails with use-specific cloud services, where businesses try to leverage on the individual strengths of different cloud services from multiple vendors.
To what extent is the cloud an enabler of a more flexible and productive workplace?
Above all, the cloud facilitates communication and collaboration that is not tied to a specific location like a physical office. As computing migrates online and into the cloud, companies are able to carry out their various operations at scale and volume almost instantaneously and from anywhere in the world. The cloud also confers a new degree of elasticity onto businesses as they are now able to scale their processes up and down with far more agility than before.
In addition, it allows businesses to expand their workforce without being beholden to limitations like office space. Taken to the logical conclusion, this could even potentially result in cost-savings from office rental and on-site hardware. Furthermore, the ability to access company infrastructure from anywhere with an Internet connection facilitates more flexible work arrangements, which results in a more nimble and productive workforce.
