living in the cloud - to be or not to be

As you know, if you are regular follow of these blog posts, I am looking at living in the cloud and the hype V's the reality.

My previous two posts, 'Wouldn't it be good to live in the cloud?' & 'A case for the cloud', covered the initiation of the idea of 'living in the cloud' and the proposal to management on undertaking the social experiment.

can I have some of your time please ...

Picture the sceen, a typical busy day in the office trying to get time in a senior executives diary which is not related to sales or revenue. After checking with the UK Head of Global Services PA it seemed there was a short break between his back-to-back meetings, and the drinks machine was situated between his office and the previous meeting.

Time for a coffee I think!
Me - "I'm glad I bumped into you. So have you had time to read my proposal?"
Boss - "Yes it's an interesting initiative especially after the presentation we saw at IPEXPO from Asen Tsvyatkov of EMC Consulting"

The presentation in question stated:

• There were 2 Billion people with Internet access in 2010
• In 2010 there were 107 Trillion emails sent
• The 3rd biggest country had 30,000 server, this was a virtual country (Facebook)
• The number of occasions in the day we use technology and the cloud has increased (Web for the News, iTunes, Spotify, Kindle, IM, social media, Evernote, Dropbox, webmail, Oyster, Google, YouTube, On demand TV, Online film rental/streaming)
• There are 5.3 Billion mobile subscriptions
• 40% of devices accessing corparate applications are not supplied by the IT department
• People x Devices x Occasions = Perfect storm for the Cloud

back to the story...

Me - "So do you agree with the proposal or do you believe it's a fad and waste of time and resources?"
Boss - "I feel that based on the information in the proposal along with the push from business customers and consumers towards cloud services it is worth while doing our own study into cloud productivity gains"
Me - "Great, so I take it you are happy for me to move forward?"
Boss - "Yes and keep me informed of you progress and findings"

to be continued.....

What are your thoughts on the proof of concept and do you have any experience you could share with me on similar initiatives?

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