Cloud must address key adoption issues

[text]

Three significant issues are impacting the adoption of the generic cloud according to David Jack the CIO of Trainline.

   Speaking at the Cloud Europe Expo, Jack said he saw data security, licensing costs and customer confidence in availability as being the three key issues the cloud industry needs to sort out.

   The Trainline.com, as well as being the leading independent retailer of train tickets online, also provides the eCommerce infrastructure for much of the UK’s rail industry and other businesses.  He said that the company is used to working in highly regulated and rigourous environments with the MoD and some 20 tier 1 retailers and so data security is paramount.   “But in the there doesn’t seem to be a plan for how data security is being dealt with – there is no real answer today as how the banks for example can have a planned PCI-accredited implementation. That’s still to be worked out,” he said.

   His second issue is what he calls the ‘parallelisation’ that is required with going to cloud-based business processes when sudden, short term and large scale rise in application licences may be needed in a test environment .   “Unfortunately none of the cloud suppliers are seeing the opportunity to say: ‘if you want to go the cloud we’ll make all our licences free, but not production, so if you want to go and build 10,000 test environments one afternoon because you want to parallelise your build environments then knock yourselves out’,” he said.  “The compulsion for me to make a move to them doesn’t exist yet”.

   He adds: “There is a huge opportunity for someone to radicalise, to parallelise licensing.  Then you’ll be getting pressure for CEO and CIOs who are can work out on the back of a fag packet that they can transform their costs in terms of licence fees.”

   His other concern is with winning the hearts and minds of customers.   “When they have their own data centre and it goes down they can put their arms around it.  But when a cloud goes down and it is the customer who is telling the supplier their system is down then that is just not credible.  It is not the irrational fear of the cloud being any better or worse than running my own data centre but I feel we are not quite there yet with monitoring and understanding what issues are there that I can look touch and fix in the same way when it’s my data centre.  So it maybe the market bifurcates between those risking their own organisations and those risking someone else’s.”

[ends]

Speaking after the Cloud Expo Europe event he adds, “It was good to see the leading companies and guest speakers. It allowed us to think of alternative ways to evolve our approach to the cloud”, over 4500 technology decision makers were at the event which is expected to be even bigger in 2013 when it runs 29th & 30th January.