Hype, fear, uncertainty and doubt, even excitement. Cloud is certainly arousing a lot of emotion. Below I attempt to give you a definition or checklist that I would strongly advise you go through when talking to anyone about their ‘cloud' offering.

Why would you want to be talking about cloud in the first place? Well, almost certainly, whether you embrace or ignore cloud technology over the ensuing months, it will have a profound impact on your organisation. Nothing has upset or disrupted the IT marketplace more than cloud technology since the birth of the PC and yet there is nothing new from a technology aspect.So why is everyone so pumped? Because for the first time it is potentially allowing us the opportunity to treat IT as a strategic business tool and allows the use, choice and (known) costs of technology to be decided at the ‘top table' by the  top table. Conversely it also presents the opportunity for IT leaders in an organisation to join in those discussions at the top table. It has taken away the financial and technical complexities previously required just to keep the lights on.

So to a non-technical person, the IT fantasy runs as follows:

• Access to the largest global computer that is of infinite size to solve any problem we may throw at it
• All the costs and hassle around all the supporting software and hardware are eliminated
• Use as little or more as I need it at any point in time and I will always know what my costs are so I can work out, directly, how much more revenue and profit I make and save as a result
• Be able to access company information from anywhere and on anything at any time
• Converse in real time in different languages across the globe to my customers and suppliers
• Not being stuck with one communication medium such as email, chat or video
• Never have to pay for an upgrade again
• Never have to worry about keeping my data in more than one place (disaster recovery/backups etc)

The above are the true potential benefits of cloud. This kind of solution has the following characteristics:

• All accessed through a browser. No software downloads and no in-house software to look after
• Switch off your servers including email, collaboration, backup, spam and tests
• Start-ups don't need to invest in server technology and therefore all the services, upgrades, patches etc.
• Existing companies should plan to switch off their existing servers
• 99.9% availability and zero lost data and time for recovery
• Immediate, no-fuss connection to and from your mobile devices

You need to be making the decision to go cloud and who to go with as soon as possible, or you may be overtaken by your competition. Who else is saying this? The government has recently issued an instruction that it expects public sector departments and councils to have 50% of

their IT in the cloud by the end of 2012.

Steve Kaye, Chief Executive, Cloud  Technology Solutions

www.cloudsolutions.co.uk [1]