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This article will take a closer look at why Small and Medium Size
Businesses (mostly) don’t use the Cloud and why they probably will steer
clear of the Cloud for some time to come.
While Cloud services can offer small- and medium-sized businesses
(SMBs) many potential benefits, including cost savings and flexibility
most SMBs will avoid such services for some time to come. Additionally,
while this author can see with the development of more powerful
combinations of cloud applications and services to SMBs, I wonder if
such combinations can come to a realization any time soon. Most SMBs
have been extremely cautious to move to the cloud. Perhaps this stems
from getting stuck with wrong services for your business, or an inherent
need for deeper security, or even: concern over down time if something
should go wrong (as was the case with Amazon this past week).
SMBs are concerned about being locked in to a provider
Many SMBs are concerned that even if their cloud service provider
offers the right technology, it might be the wrong provider for the
company in question. It might not provide a technological growth path in
line with the SMB's needs. On the other hand, if it has a lock on the
service provided, it might try to take advantage of its position as an
entrenched supplier to boost prices. No matter how you look at it, the
general lack of standardization makes it difficult for the SMBs to move
from one provider to another, particularly when specialized applications
are involved. The profiles that the P2301 project creates will help in
two ways. First, they will make it more likely those providers offering
similar applications will use the same or similar technological
approaches. Second, they will allow SMBs to choose providers that build
their services on widely used profiles and to avoid those that do not.
In both cases, switching providers will be easier.
SMB’s face uncertainties about which provider or technical approach to choose
SMBs
looking to use cloud services today pretty much have to accept the
provider's assurance that the technology or service it is offering is
right for them. Independent methodology to determine whether such claims
are true currently just does not exists because there is no objective
source of information about specific technical approaches or
applications.
SMB’s worry about the lack of interoperability
Eventually, most SMBs will probably want cloud services from
different providers to work together. Still, even if the services
themselves are similar or identical to what say another provider is
offering the SMB view working across providers as possible. What are
missing are common methods for allowing different clouds to talk to one
another. There is talk of such intercloud interoperability. The IEEE is
talking about coming up with standards around such interoperability
(P2303 Project – developing a format standard for Cloud-to-cloud based
communication)This project too is still at such an early stage that it
has defined little except general goals. Developing such solutions and
standards for the cloud has been compared to the task IEEE faced to the
creation of the SS7 and Intelligent Network (IN) protocols that the
global phone system uses, or routing protocols like the domain name
system (DNS) and Autonomous System (AS) numbering that support the
terrestrial and wireless Internet.
SMBs are concerned with knowledgeable partners
SMBs are concerned about the ability of various applications and
services to work together across the cloud. Perhaps the biggest
obstacle to SMBs' adoption of cloud services is that the kind of
services that they are likely to find most compelling do not yet exist.
More interesting, while individual cloud computing apps may be useful on
their own, their power and usefulness increases dramatically when they
are integrated with other apps. In addition, currently such integration
is difficult and complicated to accomplish.
Currently this kind of integration is typically a one-off effort
by one or both of the providers. The combination of common profiles and
interoperability standards that the IEEE initiative produces will make
such integration routine. That will open up tremendous opportunities for
the development of new combinations of services. Moreover, while we
are the forefront of the explosion of the cloud, most SMBs will avoid it
until the real work of integration, standardization and leveraged apps
can be fully realized
Cross posted from myITview.com
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