Google is building a cloud-based empire for enterprise
IT. Chrome OS is its latest effort to launch into the cloud and
offer a viable alternative to Microsoft's dominance down on the
desktop. Adrian Joseph, the new managing director for Google
Enterprise EMEA, explains the company's rationale.
Coming into the role of managing director for Google Enterprise
EMEA during a particularly bumpy time for the economy, I find
myself having some very interesting conversations with CIOs. For
instance, the CIO of a large automotive manufacturer recently told
me that their IT department needed to reduce its expenditure by
30%. These discussions centre around Google's cloud based offering
Google Apps, a suite of online tools designed to help improve
collaboration and communication.
With the recession and budget constraints at front of mind for
many, the promise of a dramatically reduced total cost of ownership
is a strong draw for businesses considering cloud computing. The
official findings hammer this point home: Gartner is predicting
2009 sales of cloud-based software to grow 22% to a record $8
billion. So how does the cost analysis bear out and is it a strong
enough incentive to persuade businesses to move to the cloud?
According to Gartner, a typical IT department spends 80% of its
budget keeping the lights on, managing, patching, cooling and
otherwise caring for servers and applications in their own data
centres. Moving some of this burden to the cloud can therefore
bring big savings.
It's not just the initial savings on the licences and hardware
that can help businesses manage their spending in the downturn -
running services remotely frees up time and energy for CIOs to
improve different areas of the business.
The nature of web-based services can help a company make money,
as well as save it, by improving the productivity of its staff. For
instance, employees can work in the same documents at the same
time, commenting on one another's input and sharing and
communicating new ideas.
Mobile workers can view and edit documents from any location.
The Guardian saw this pay out when it sent a number of journalists
to the Beijing Olympics who were able to provide coordinate their
movements and coverage collaboratively online; in many cases like
this businesses are seeing their interactions with the technology
develop in a way they did not anticipate.
One question that often crops up when I'm speaking to CIOs is
whether a move to the cloud means compromising on security. While
it can be hard for companies to deal with the fact that the storage
of their information is outsourced, I believe that cloud computing
can be more secure than hosting data yourself.
Of course, there can't be a trade off between cost savings and
reliability. It's true, there have been some high profile outages
for many cloud services, including our own. However, it's important
to put these into perspective. The average monthly downtime of
Google Mail in a typical year comes to 10-15 minutes per month.
So back to our original question - does the cost argument for
moving to the cloud bear out? With infrastructure and management
savings, the promise of new ways of working delivering productivity
benefits and the potential for reduced downtime there are evidently
many ways businesses can save with the cloud.
Ultimately this will be for CIOs and their boards to decide, but
with 3,000 businesses signing up to Google Apps each day and my own
sense from conversations with European IT directors, it feels like
a reduced total cost of ownership is proving a strong draw for
cloud computing.