Have Irish organisations soared to new heights with cloud services?

We have seen a marked acceleration in the adoption of cloud services. Everything from backup services, email and collaboration to file storage, web/email filtering and Line of Business applications are on the ‘shopping list’ but not all are suitable for an organisation.

It makes sense for organisations to leverage the “pay-for-use” IT model, negating the need for capital investment and releasing internal IT expertise for more strategic tasks.

For others, it is the agility to scale rapidly, to reflect periodic workloads. More use cloud to make their business more mobile, extending more applications outside of the corporate office.

To date, we have observed cloud adoption following a single delivery model – perhaps delivering a specific service, or application. Increasingly, businesses are integrating these services with other processes leading to a more hybrid approach. We also expect to see businesses extend their private infrastructure into the cloud, utilising the Infrastructure as a Service model more.

An organisation’s size, skills, budget, cost management practices, ethos, standards, regulatory and compliance requirements dictate the cloud services they choose. But while cloud brings great opportunity, there is a risk of supplier lock-in. Interoperability between cloud and on-premises and other cloud can be challenging and advanced in-house skills are still required to integrate, monitor and maintain the cloud service.

How an organisation handles these challenges will dictate the type of cloud computing model they adopt.