It’s
been ten years since Oracle’s Larry Ellison had his Thomas Watson moment,
dismissing cloud computing as a fad, nonsense and absurd. Clearly, in the same
way that the number of computers in use around the world didn’t cap out at five
units, as IBM’s Watson predicted in 1943, cloud computing has gone from
strength to strength, with worldwide spend on cloud infrastructure in 2018
estimated at in excess of $80 billion and still growing.
Fast
forward a short decade, and it’s almost as if cloud computing is barely worth a
mention. It’s a bit like saying an appliance is powered by electricity. Well,
obviously… We take cloud’s economic model as table stakes now: allowing
companies of all sizes to access the best services for them, quickly,
cost-effectively and with minimal support required, whether or not the vendor
has set up shop in their country. Cloud services helped break the stranglehold
of the black box ERP vendors giving companies flexibility, user-friendly
interfaces and solutions to niche requirements. Crucially they, on the whole,
improved security and allowed SMEs, and even individuals, to access
enterprise-grade software services.
But,
in comparison to the latest headline grabbing buzzwords, such as AI and machine
learning, in some quarters cloud is now fairly middle of the road. So why am I
still writing about it today?
Well,
it’s not plain sailing just yet. And it’s worth checking in on some of the
assumptions around cloud we might wrongly think are foregone conclusions.
I’ve
written about one before: the incompatibility between the latest
legislation to protect personal identification information, such as Europe’s
GDPR, and laws trying to fight terrorism, such as the US’s CLOUD Act (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data
Act), which allows the US authorities to request data from US service
providers, wherever in the world this data is stored, and without telling the
people whose personal data is involved. Given that four out of five of the top
cloud service providers by market share are US companies – that’s a lot of personal
information about a lot of people including US and non-US citizens. CLOUD and
GDPR are clearly in direct opposition to each other, and furthermore both complicate
cloud services where the service provider, the data centre, the company
collecting the personal identification data and the customer could be each
located in separate countries. For now, the stalemate between GDPR and CLOUD
continues.
Another assumption that we
should be careful of making is that everyone around the world has the same
access to internet bandwidth and data as the highly urbanised regions of the
developed world – where, typically, cloud services are designed and built.
Despite the massive advances in internet connectivity around the globe, it is
still the case that some countries, and also remoter regions in well-connected
nations, don’t have the level of access to always-on internet connectivity
required by cloud services.
Take Tuvalu, the South
Pacific island nation, and one of our clients. Ironically, for a country whose
second biggest export is the .tv top level internet domain name, it is one of
most unconnected countries in the world. While connectivity via a submarine
fibre optical cable is in planning, it is currently connected to the rest of
the world via limited, and expensive, satellite communications. Cloud computing
services are simply a non-starter here.
Likewise that branch office
in a small town that still only has basic DSL or dial-up connectivity, or a
mining operation in a distant province, won’t benefit from the same advantages
of the cloud-based service as the head office in the city, and, in a worst case
scenario, may end up in a complete disconnect from the HQ.
And, even when internet
connectivity is broadly universal, a secondary issue such as regular power
outages could impact a company or individual’s ability to access cloud
services. An SME in a big city like Johannesburg or Lagos that can’t afford a
generator could be disconnected from basics such as email during a power
outage.
In a cloud-first world, these
branch and field offices, and SMEs, won’t have the same options of services to
choose from and subsequent productivity gains thanks to a better fitting
offering. Instead of being able to self-service, they’ll be stuck in the black
box consultant loop, with lengthy installation and customisation loops, and an
invoice to match. Their ability to collaborate will be limited, their data will
be slightly out of date and out of joint, and they’ll miss out on cloud
economies of scale. And mothership will miss out on critical input from the
coalface of their organisation.
So sure, think cloud-first,
but don’t think cloud-only. Consider ways to practically enable your people who
don’t have the same access to the cloud that you do, without regressing back to
the days of the mega-installation of on-premise kit.
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