Practical Analysis: How To Lead In Cloud Adoption

For both panelists, there were other concerns for maturity. One that I found particularly interesting is the way many SaaS vendors sell their products--convincing line of business owners of their product’s value by demonstrating whizbang user interfaces and cool features, while essentially daring the IT department to stop the sale with their esoteric concerns like data integration capabilities, user management, and data security models (you know … the little stuff). The threat of this sort of adoption alone should make IT execs very amenable to discussions about adopting SaaS applications. Better to help vet them upfront than to try to unseat them after the fact.

The bottom line for both organizations is this: neither expects cloud-based services to be substantially cheaper than on premises software. What they’re after is innovation in areas where they themselves aren’t likely to spend a lot of time innovating. They still worry quite a lot about that small stuff like data integration, user management, and data security models, and because of that they tend not to put highly sensitive data in the cloud--period.

These companies are in the mix actively spending money on cloud services, but they realize the maturity is a good ways off and because of that, their cloud investments are still small as an overall portion of their IT budget. They understand that cloud providers aren’t willing to write strong contracts because of their immaturity and so they evaluate their providers largely by the company they keep, rather than by demanding bulletproof contracts and SLAs.

That’s a good, pragmatic view of cloud adoption if ever I’ve heard one.