Blade Watch

Reuters

Uncertainty over adequate security and data privacy outweighs other barriers by a wide margin BLUE BELL, Pa.–(Business Wire)– According to an online poll recently conducted by Unisys Corporation (NYSE:UIS), security and data privacy concerns remain the most significant impediment to the adoption of cloud computing among enterprise users.

Of the 312 respondents, 51 percent cited security and data privacy concerns when answering the question, “What do you see as your greatest barrier to moving to cloud?” The next-highest barrier to adoption of cloud computing, cited by 21 percent of the respondents, was integration of cloud-based applications with existing systems.

Concerns about the ability to bring systems back in-house and regulatory/compliance issues were cited by 18 percent and 10 percent of respondents, respectively.

Security will be part of it, though I wonder how much of the security, the operational and cost issues floated will actually be political. Replace me with a service provider, a bought in application or service?

Realistically, abstracting the emotion, the loyalty and any other issues, there is no reason that I can’t buy in the specific services and applications that I need, the virtual machine down the wire from the Internet or a cloud service.  In the EU there are some rules about data which we need to observe, and there will be the corporate sensitivity nature of data, but with the right levels of due diligence coupled with ‘acceptance of the risk’, it becomes more about your willingness to buy-in a service and willingness to pay.

It need not be difficult to buy in a desktop service, or file and print with the right settings and processes in place, but a trading system or an email system, that’s a few steps away from the ‘comfort zone’ of doing everything in house. By internalizing it, I control the cost, I control what is an acceptable operational risk, and I control what is a change, what is a business as usual update to the application code. 

I wonder if for these reasons we might not find internal cloud the way forward, that India runs the world wide desktop and email platform, New York runs the backoffice applications and infrastructure, with London doing middle office and Paris Front office? Could we in essence not have regional/departmental cloud/application services, where I as a business unit commit to the applications and services that I need?

This requires  a change in mind set, not just technically but operationally, all those times I’ve met someone at an American bank, “oh we can’t decide on that, we’ll have to ask New York..”, but when it’s Albert from Ohio that runs your Exchange email platform, how does New York feel about that? Who controls standards and levels of support? What’s urgent in New York, what’s production standard, what’s a core activity is easy when your in the same building, but as we disperse geographically, it’s that bit harder not only to enforce the same standards, but to appreciate what works here might not work in the real world over there. We need to consider technology based service delivery moving away from a chargeback customer driven model, to one based on a service delivery based model – what are your requirements, we’ll provide a platform for that, your code/application or service neeeds to meet these standards for development/tier3/tier2/tier support.

So in future could it be IT.bankname.com which provides your default IT services, file and print/network and storage, with applicationdev.bankname.com doing your support, and bank.com buying services from these companies? Who’s leading who and what would a technology driven infrastructure be like?

Interestingly, it’s the small/medium businesses, those smaller businesses where everyone does everything that are likely to be the quick users, whether it’s grid on demand, a VMware cloud, or just handing ‘those troublesome’ backups over to a provider, they have the flexibility the freedom to say, this isn’t working, let’s see who can do it and move on. In essence, they haven’t the organizational barriers to success in delivery that an enterprise might – “…Have security, Jane from accounts and Nigel from arc welding approved this?”

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