Tuesday 30 August 2011

Has the IT industry got its head in the clouds?



This year has been all about ‘the cloud’, or perhaps it has been about all about hosting by another name? Like Camberwell in the property market, electric cars in the world of travel, or Ireland as a holiday destination, hosting has been the ‘next big thing’ for a very long time now. The cloud on the other hand still seems new, though it has changed from being a simple analogy for the internet, to the hosting of an application somewhere on the internet, (but you didn’t need to know where), to being used with the addition of the prefix ‘private’ to describe any hosted application. So,it is hosting, but we’ll come back to that later. Anyway, however you label it, as IRIS starts to roll out ‘IRIS Open Hosting’ in earnest, I have been asking myself if this concept is really relevant to my clients, and if so why.

Well, this is a blog not a crime thriller, so I’ll tell you the answer straight away – it is relevant. As to why, that takes a little longer but here goes. Firstly, it’s not just about cost. For a long time, hosting didn’t get off the ground in some markets because to make it work, you probably had to slim down staff in order to recoup the cost of externally managed services, and organisations naturally try to avoid this. Now that is not necessarily the case. True, it shouldn’t cost any more, but there are so many hidden costs that don’t equate directly to staff numbers that it can pay for itself without having to ‘make difficult decisions’. The best evidence for this is from the IT departments themselves. As recently as last year, I would have hesitated to approach a client boasting a large IT department with a hosting proposal, on the basis that turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. Yet this year some of the largest IT teams we work with have been taking the initiative and raising the subject. There are a number of reasons for this, but I will limit myself to just three.

Firstly, we now all accept that we need a permanent connection to the internet to function for so many reasons, using possible down time to a remote location as an excuse not to do it makes no sense any more. Secondly, clients want stakeholders, (donors, members, customers etc), to be able to interact with them via websites or email at any time of day. That means ensuring that all key servers, i.e. those running email and the CRM database have to be available 24/7 as well as the main web site server. Thirdly, as is so often the case with IT issues, we can’t ignore Microsoft. The men from Redmond are encouraging us all to host all our generic applications – Office, Email, Sharepoint , and why not, when you think of the pain an organisation goes through each time it upgrades to the next version of Windows or Office.

To come back to the hosting/cloud issue, it is useful to talk about the cloud, because it reminds us that we are talking about so much more than moving your key server out of the office, because we are already moving away from local area networks to a world in which everything is online. As the IT Director of a major UK charity remarked to me recently – ‘Hosting has to be the way to go for us, as far as I am concerned, we would be mad not to’. Head in the clouds? I don’t think so.