Love it or hate it, cloud computing is here and helping companies become more agile and competitive. There are two common misconceptions about the cloud. The first is it’s only for big companies. The second is it’s only for small companies.
The truth is it’s for everyone regardless of the size of your organization or your industry. That’s like saying that computers are only for big companies – I think most of us know how dumb that is.
Cloud computing has brought capabilities to everyone that only the largest companies could afford in the past. Look at the poster child for cloud computing, Salesforce.com. Years ago, the only way you could afford a sophisticated CRM system was if you had a large IT staff and budget to make it happen. Today, anyone can afford CRM, whether it’s through Salesforce.com or the myriad other cloud offerings out there.
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Imagine if the Founding Fathers of the United States had iPads when they were signing the Declaration of Independence or The US Constitution. Rather than pulling out a big quill pen and dipping it in ink, each delegate could have walked up to the desk and signed the document with their finger. In fact, they could have passed the iPad around to each other for signing rather than all walking up to the document. That would have helped Ben Franklin, since he had gout and it was tough for him to stand up and walk.
If John Hancock and Thomas Jefferson used DocuSign Ink to sign an electronic version of The Declaration of Independence, not only would the iPad have captured their signature, but it would have put a time and date stamp along with the GPS coordinates of where they signed. All of that information, including the document, would go to a secure storage area in the cloud and be retained.
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According to IDC, 80% of new commercial enterprise applications will be deployed on cloud platforms in 2012. Add to that the expectation that intelligent mobile devices will exceed “traditional computing” devices by almost 2 to 1 within the next 24 months and you have a very different world from just a few years ago.
Cloud computing is very hot and every major software, hardware and technology services company is trying to get into it. In some cases, vendors are throwing a web front end onto an application and calling it a cloud service. Many others are creating infrastructure for companies to run their own applications in the cloud or are providing complete business systems.
I was talking to a customer this week and the CIO said they are moving as much as they can to the cloud. Some will be public and some of it private. He said that a vendor would have a hard time getting a traditional server-based product in the door today. They don’t want to buy anymore servers, capitalize them and go through a chargeback allocation process.
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Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day in the United States and I was reflecting on some of the things I’m thankful for when doing business everyday. Of course I’m thankful for the great people I work with, my family for putting up with me and for all the customers that I can help. But I’m also thankful all the technology I use.
Sometimes using technology can be a real headache, especially when something doesn’t work and you have a deadline in 5 minutes. But most of the time, I’m amazed at how well things work. I remember the old days before using a computer, but I can’t think how we actually got things done.
We all use technology to work and play and a lot of it has made life easier. In many ways it’s given me more time to do what matters in my business. Here are a few people and things I’m thankful for that make business easier.
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I had a conversation with an attorney the other day and she was telling me how her law firm is getting Apple iPads for all the attorneys. She said there was a lot of resistance, at first, from her IT department. That’s been the case with many law firms, but improved productivity has won the day.
In fact, according to the 2011 ILTA/InsideLegal Technology Purchasing Survey, which examined the purchasing trends of law firms with 50+ Attorneys, 25% of respondents said that the iPad would be one of the major technology purchases over the next 12 months. 11% of firms had already purchased iPads for their attorneys and 55% reported providing IT support for employees who purchase and use their personal devices.
Many law firms and other businesses are concerned about leaking the most sensitive information in their business. As with many organizations, law firms use documents to store client and case materials. Some of them are in a case management system, but many are on people’s laptops, desktops, mobile devices and file servers. I asked the attorney what would happen if those documents got out of the company and into the hands of other law firms, the media or other businesses? She said it would be devastating. Letting her client correspondence, legal briefs and strategies out would ruin them. Their clients would lose all trust in them and it would most likely put them out of business.
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