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The problem exists in pricing as well, and a general confusion in the marketplace over models. Among CIOs across 13 European countries, 47% noted that a lack of transparency over pricing models may be halting the adoption of cloud services (Portio Research).
If a company moves its billing service to the clouds and business gets messy with the vendor, or a better opportunity arises, how easy is it to move to a new vendor? Is the data interoperable with a new cloud service, or will the migration be costly and time consuming?
Reliability
Still, one of the simplest barriers to cloud computing boils down to reliability. Even the biggest providers of cloud services, like Microsoft, clearly don’t have the bugs ironed out yet. On office collaboration sites (a relatively simplistic service vs. say an IaaS solution), documents routinely cannot be accessed or are improperly uploaded. (We here at Pipeline have experienced these challenges!)
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Each of the hurdles to cloud adoption also opens a door for a solution. |
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manageable and customizable in the
cloud as it is in the IT department on
the second floor? If an unexpected
explosion in new accounts occurs, will
the cloud solution offer adequate
scalability?
When Pipeline contacted regarding challenges to enterprise cloud adoption, Drew Rockwell, CEO of MDS, summed up the manageability question:
“Moving to cloud-based services from traditional in-house managed services is increasingly becoming an attractive proposition for enterprises. However, with this comes a greater degree of complexity and control of business processes. Whether its telecommunications services, or data and application hosting, the upsides are generally low capital investment, and the removal of day-to-day management overheads, however it is not uncommon to worry about losing control and management of such services.”
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Using the internet as the main pathway for cloud computing has the same inherent flaws that all internet-driven services (like streaming video) suffer from: latency, response time, and packet loss. For daily computing, this may not matter, but for mission critical applications, it’s simply unacceptable.
Concerns over reliability affect decision makers all over the world. Yankee Group research pegs reliability as the number three barrier to cloud adoption in the United States. In India, 75% of executives say reliability is the chief deterrent to a cloud migration, according to a study by the non-profit IT Governance Institute. And in research conducted by Portio, 58% of Euorpean CIOs and senior IT professionals said reliability of cloud services was a concern.
Manageability
Once a service has been migrated to
the cloud, the questions of
performance management, monitoring
and agility arise. Recent research by
the TM Forum indicated that providers
rate managing service quality as their
biggest challenge. Will, say, a customer
charging service be as easily
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Solutions are Opportunities
Each of the hurdles to cloud adoption also opens a door for a solution, better known as a business opportunity. It is incumbent upon cloud service vendors to educate the buyers about offerings, build trust and offer after-sales support. Vendors must be transparent in terms of their security and protocols to build trust; transparent in their cost structure and portability to create market knowledge and selling strategies; and offer and support real management solutions and reliability metrics.
There are certainly many hurdles facing enterprise cloud adoption, but they are not insurmountable. And despite the challenges, most CIOs see cloud computing as the operating method of the future—anywhere from 75-86%, depending on whose research you review. It’s no longer “if,” but “when.” So the questions going forward are how quickly vendors will create solutions that address the challenges listed above, and how quickly decision makers will understand and implement enterprise cloud services; the innovators in the market are already proffering answers.
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