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Five Reasons Corporate Executives Should Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Cloud

NetApp

Have corporate executives stopped worrying and learned to love the cloud?

For many, the cloud has shed its Dr. Strangelove-like weirdness. A recent survey by North Bridge Venture Partners found that half of the 785 company executives queried professed “complete confidence” in cloud computing. That’s an astonishing 37 percentage points up from only a year ago.

What’s most surprising about this turnaround is that it comes after a particularly stormy year. Amazon Web Services crashed last April, bringing down popular social networking sites Evite, Reddit and Quora. An hour-long cloud outage costs an average of $89,000. Crashes have become so frequent a new blog, cloudfail.net, “born out of boredom and a desire to have a handy bookmark to check for known outages” does nothing more than track them.

Corporate executives are a notoriously conservative bunch. Why are they throwing caution to the wind? A simple answer: They aren’t. They’ve done the math and found that the rewards are far greater than the risks. Among the benefits of moving to the cloud:

  • It’s cheaper. Companies that have moved their data centers to the cloud report cost savings of between 30% and 50%. Clouds operate like a utility: You pay only for what you use rather than shell out the money for expensive computer hardware and software.
  • It’s simpler. All the latest bells and whistles without the need to test or customize them for your needs. Studies have shown that users are better able to digest small and frequent software changes than infrequent overhauls.
  • It’s expandable. Under the old model, adding capacity was complicated and expensive. The cloud’s almost limitless connecting new employees to your system doesn’t require an upfront cost. You’re charged by amount of time you use not the number or users who require a connection. New users can be added on the fly.
  • It’s cross platform. Users can connect using any device and from any location no matter the distance. Want to work from the Bahamas? No problem.
  • It’s light on overhead. You no longer need to devote precious space for computer equipment and the bodies to operate and maintain it. Corporate executives are as ready as they’ll ever be for this brave new world of computing. But they haven’t stopped their handwringing entirely. More than half of those who responded to the survey said they are worried about data security.  Nearly 40% said they fear that whatever measures they take to protect their data won’t be enough to meet federal and state regulatory requirements.

The smartest know that to gain the most they must prepare for the worst. They’re looking for cloud services that offer the best disaster-hedging technologies.

Don’t expect the cloud to be without the occasional moment of turbulence. It took decades before electrical grid – a modern city experiences a 15-minute blackout per year compared with the cloud’s average of 7.5 hours –  became as reliable as it is today. Despite the instability of its early days, the electrical grid continued to grow and connect. That’s because when it worked, there was nothing else like it.