I am pleased to be a judge for the UK Cloud awards again this year. https://www.ukcloudawards.co.uk/
If your company is keen to apply for the awards the closing date for entries is the 23rd February 2018. And hopefully I will then see you for the awards ceremony at County Hall in May!
It’s almost a given that cloud technology has the power to change the way organisations operate. Cost efficiency, increased business agility and time-saving are just some of the key associated benefits[1]. As cloud technology has matured, it’s likely not enough for businesses to simply have cloud platforms in place as part of their operations. The optimisation and continual upgrading of the technology may be just as important over the long term. With that in mind, a central research question remains: how can global businesses maximise their use of the cloud? What are the key ingredients they need to maintain, manage and maximise their usage of cloud?
For instance, do enterprises have the technical expertise to roll out the major cloud projects that will reap the significant efficiencies and savings for their business? How can large enterprises ensure they have the right cloud expertise in place to capitalise on innovations in cloud technology and remain competitive? Finally, what are the cost implications of nurturing in-house cloud expertise vs harnessing those of a managed cloud service provider?
A colleague (Carsten Sorensen) and I are working with Rackspace® on a project (which is also sponsored by Intel®) to find out. But we would need some help from IT leaders like you?
How you can help
We’re looking to interview IT decision makers/leaders in some of the UK’s largest enterprises (those with more than 1,000 employees and with a minimum annual turnover of £500m) which use cloud technology in some form, to help guide the insights developed as part of this project.
The interviews will be no more than 30 mins long via telephone. Your participation in the project will also give you early access to the resulting report covering the initial key findings. We would also share subsequent academic articles with you. We follow research ethics guidelines and can ensure anonymity to yourself and your company (feel free to email confidentially to discuss this issue).
If this sounds like something you’d like to get involved in then please email me w.venters@lse.ac.uk
Best wishes,
Dr Will Venters,
Dr Carsten Sorensen,
and Dr Florian Allwein.
(Photo (cc) Damien Pollet with thanks!)
On Wednesday last week I attended “Cloud Expo Europe” at London’s Excel centre. One of particularly interesting product was Netskope (also a finalists in the UK Cloud Awards) who are addressing the challenge of ShadowIT – employees use of cloud-services which are not sanctioned by the corporate IT departments.
According to Accenture (2013) “78% of cloud procurement comes from Strategic Business Units (SBUs), and only 28% from centralized IT functions”. Without some form of control the data-protection and compliance challenges of this can prove a huge. Users are also poorly skilled in making rational decisions about the safety of company data and products like Netskope address this by examining fire-wall logs or running Proxy servers and providing an easy interface so IT departments can enforce cloud access policies. The product analyses users’ access patterns and sends alerts, encrypts content on upload, blocks cloud transactions and quarantines content for review by Legal or IT. It essentially monitors and stops employees doing anything risky.
For me, the value of this product is the database of different cloud services with detailed information as to their safety and compliance. The product is however also really frustrating. At its heart is the assumption that the job of the IT professional is to monitor, control and police employees. This puts IT in opposition to the other business functions. Why couldn’t this product have instead started from a different assumption – that employees are, mostly, just trying to do their work as efficiently as possible. While a few are bad, most are just ignorant to the risks. Netskope would have been fantastic if it instead helped reduce this ignorance rather than policing users’ failures. Had it provided an employee-portal to allow employees to evaluate cloud services prior to adoption it would have promoted the effective use of them, and allowed users to make rational decisions on their adoption. The IT department would be in a facilitation role rather than a policing role, and employees would feel in control (rather than in fear). The safety would be just the same (with Netskope policing policy) but with users feeling part of that effort. Productivity gains might also be achieved as users are freed to try using new valuable IT services knowing they were doing it safely and with management approval.
This isn’t to criticise Netskope for what it does do – but to call upon new approaches to thinking about the role of IT and the CIO in this cloud-future.
Follow this link for the video an interview I did for the Financial Times on regulation of cloud computing:
Understanding Cloud Computing – Financial Times.
An article I wrote with Edgar Whitley and Leslie Willcocks for the journal Strategic Outsourcing has been awarded the “Outstanding paper of 2014” award. This means that the article is freely available from the following website (articles are usually $32 so quite a saving!). Please feel free to download a copy today:
Emerald Insight | Cloud sourcing and innovation: slow train coming?: A composite research study.
Abstract:
Purpose – Although cloud computing has been heralded as driving the innovation agenda, there is growing evidence that cloud computing is actually a “slow train coming”. The purpose of this paper is to seek to understand the factors that drive and inhibit the adoption of cloud computing, particularly in relation to its use for innovative practices.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on a composite research base including two detailed surveys and interviews with 56 participants in the cloud supply chain undertaken between 2010 and 2013. The insights from this data are presented in relation to set of antecedents to innovation and a cloud sourcing model of collaborative innovation.
Findings – The paper finds that while some features of cloud computing will hasten the adoption of cloud, and its use for innovative purposes by the enterprise, there are also clear challenges that need to be addressed before cloud can be adopted successfully. Interestingly, the analysis highlights that many of these challenges arise from the technological nature of cloud computing itself.
Research limitations/implications – The research highlights a series of factors that need to be better understood for the maximum benefit from cloud computing to be achieved. Further research is needed to assess the best responses to these challenges.
Practical implications – The research suggests that enterprises need to undertake a number of steps for the full benefits of cloud computing to be achieved. It suggests that collaborative innovation is not necessarily an immediate consequence of adopting cloud computing.
Originality/value – The paper draws on an extensive research base to provide empirically informed analysis of the complexities of adopting cloud computing for innovation.
I am booked to speak at the Cloud World Forum in June. The registration pages are now open so please do book and I will catch you there… It’s an impressive lineup:
The latest article from our long-running Cloud Computing research stream has just been published…
Leslie Willcocks, Will Venters, Edgar A. Whitley, (2013) “ Cloud Sourcing and Innovation: Slow Train Coming? A Composite Research Study“, Strategic Outsourcing: An International Journal, Vol. 6 Iss: 2
ABSTRACT:
Purpose – Although cloud computing has been heralded as driving the innovation agenda, there is growing evidence that cloud is actually a “slow train coming”. The purpose of this paper is to seek to understand the factors that drive and inhibit the adoption of cloud particularly in relation to its use for innovative practices.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on a composite research base including two detailed surveys and interviews with 56 participants in the cloud supply chain undertaken between 2010 and 2013. The insights from this data are presented in relation to set of antecedents to innovation and a cloud sourcing model of collaborative innovation.
Findings – The paper finds that while some features of cloud computing will hasten the adoption of cloud and its use for innovative purposes by the enterprise, there are also clear challenges that need to be addressed before cloud can be successfully adopted. Interestingly, our analysis highlights that many of these challenges arise from the technological nature of cloud computing itself.
Research limitations/implications – The research highlights a series of factors that need to be better understood for the maximum benefit from cloud computing to be achieved. Further research is needed to assess the best responses to these challenges.
Practical implications – The research suggests that enterprises need to undertake a number of steps for the full benefits of cloud computing to be achieved. It suggests that collaborative innovation is not necessarily an immediate consequence of adopting cloud computing.
Originality/value – The paper draws on an extensive research base to provide empirically informed analysis of the complexities of adopting cloud computing for innovation.
Cloud Computing Now Makes It Easier (and Cheaper) to Innovate: Study – Forbes.
Our research on Cloud Computing is discussed in an article on Forbes.com!
Our fourth report on Cloud Computing is now available… This report looks at the future of business, mapping out the concept of the Cloud Corporation, and discusses the fragmentation and redevelopment of the technology supply industry. In particular we discuss how the industry may become layered and increasingly specialised – with organisations benefiting from the business agility and better alignment offered this will create.
Click on the image below for the full report.
For those desperate to understand the market size of Cloud, two articles in the recent news provide interesting insight. The first, from the Economist, demonstrates ClockKick’s attempts to estimate Amazon’s virtual computer provision, and estimates 90000 servers for Amazon – in the USA East-Coast only!
Quote: “Randy Bias, the boss of Cloudscaling, a IT-engineering firm, did not use these results when he put Amazon’s annual cloud-computing revenues at between $500m and $700m in 2010. And in August UBS, an investment bank, predicted that they will total $500m in 2010 and $750m in 2011.” (Economist 29th December 2010).
Information technology goes global: Tanks in the cloud | The Economist.
Another interesting thing to watch is Intel’s profits which have risen “thanks to server sales”. Making profits of $3.4bn in current economic times is tough – as the flat sales of PCs is testament. It is in the sales of servers that this profit has been made. A large proportion of these servers must be going into cloud, either to replace ageing (and power-hungry expensive data-centers) with virtualised servers (as private clouds in some form) or to provide public cloud offering (and SaaS services such as FaceBook and Google) within newly developed data centers.
Binary Blurring 