Cloudbusting

On Friday it was the MMIT (Multimedia Information Technology Group, part of CILIP) conference here in Sheffield. I was very pleased to give the opening welcome, and as the theme of the conference was "Cloudbusting - Demystifying the cloud", to give a very short overview of our experience of cloud services. So, I did a quick run through of the challenges facing us -
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Consumerisation of IT.

• 24/7
• User interfaces
• Mobility
• BYOD
• User interfaces
• Social networking
• User expectations
• Critical nature of IT

No surprises there! My point was that all of these can be drivers to move to cloud based services, such as our move to Google. What's important is the quality of the service - it isn't about cost cutting. A recent benchmarking exercise shows that our email service is about 70% cheaper than a peer group, which is good obviously, but the real driver should be about service provision. A better service, available and support 24/7, more accessible, more mobile, and more innovative - google can innovate much faster than we can. Which is mainly a good thing, but not always :-)

I couldn't stay for much more of the conference, but the keynote speaker talking about Searching in the Cloud was fascinating.  How do we find all of the stuff that's out there, and a particular issue, how do we link internal and external information. It can also be difficult yo keep track of your own personal stuff when it's outside the boundaries of your local system.  How true!