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SCC highlights business benefits of Cloud Computing

Europe's largest independent technology solutions provider has challenged perceptions that cloud computing is not being enthusiastically adopted by businesses.

Responding to Gartner's most recent report into cloud computing, which suggested that businesses are not yet ready to adopt the technology, pan-European integrator SCC has suggested that companies are embracing the model more readily than the research suggests. Chief Technical Officer Rhys Sharp says that while large corporations may be approaching the cloud with caution, many small to medium sized enterprises already see the Software as a Service (SaaS) concept as an essential part of their IT infrastructure.

"While it's true that the standard definition of cloud computing - which is a massively scalable computing and storage entity connected to the internet - is quite a new phenomenon, also wrapped into cloud services are the traditional hosted services. Software as a Service models from organisations like Microsoft and Salesforce are quite mature now and have been around for a number of years, so in reality there should be no barriers to entry into that type of environment," said Sharp.

"Many businesses see email and collaboration tools as a commodity today, but as they don't want the hassle of running them, pushing these services out to the cloud is much more attractive and they are doing it in increasing numbers. Our experience is that for smaller organisations the capital expenditure required to set up their own infrastructure is a far more significant problem in the current economic climate, leading to a growing tendency to look upon hosted services as the most logical and cost-effective option."

As the cloud computing model rapidly matures, SCC's CTO admits that some of the newer services available have yet to break through as serious mainstream business options. However he believes that despite understandable caution, commerce's attitude to such platforms will reach a tipping point within a year.

"The more challenging part of the equation are the emerging environments from such organisations as Google, Amazon and Microsoft's Azure platform. These are less mature and people are only just starting to work out how to utilise them, so it's true that widescale adoption is a little bit away. Even then, I think it will only be 6-12 months before those environments become fully mature and everybody understands the cost model associated with them," said Sharp.

"From our experience, in companies where commodity components are already being outsourced the day-to-day business transactional functions are still frequently being retained in house, so we could be 10-15 years away from large companies pushing all of their technology requirements into the cloud. The process is already underway however, and in many smaller companies we are already seeing the demise of the internal IT department as a result," said Sharp.