5 Reasons SMBs Aren't Using Cloud Services

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. hopes its Cloud Computing Initiative will lessen these hesitations. The effort includes two standards development projects. The first, dubbed P2301, is in substance a design guide for cloud computing services. The second, P2302, aims to develop a formal interoperability standard for cloud services.

Uncertainties about which provider or technical approach to choose SMBs looking to use cloud services today largely have to accept the provider's assurance that the innovation or service it is offering is right for them. There's no independent way to determine whether that's true, because there's no objective source of information about specific technical approaches or applications. The IEEE initiative will use different methods to put different cloud services in perspective, even though SMBs will for all that have to work to make use of the resulting information.

Concerns about getting locked in to a provider Even if an SMB's cloud service provider offers the right research, it might be the wrong provider for the company in question. It might, for instance, not provide a technological growth path in line with the SMB's needs. Or it might try to take advantage of its position as an entrenched supplier to boost prices. Either way, the general lack of standardization makes it difficult for the SMBs to move from one provider to another, particularly when specialized applications are involved. The profiles that the P2301 project creates will help in two ways. First, they will make it more likely that providers offering similar applications will use the same or similar technological approaches. Second, they will allow SMBs to choose providers that build their services on widely used profiles, and to avoid those that don't. In both cases, switching providers will be easier.

This project too is on the whole at such an early stage that it has defined little except general goals. Bernstein compares the task it faces to the creation of the SS7 and Intelligent Network protocols that the global phone system uses, or routing protocols like the domain name system and Autonomous System numbering that support the terrestrial and wireless Internet.

Of course, it takes a lot more than communication protocols to make the Internet what it is today. As well crucial are security/encryption methods, common file formats, email protocols, browser standards and other such components. Similarly, true interoperability of cloud services will require the formal or de facto standardization of both applications and communications, as evidenced by the fact that the term interoperability appears in the titles of both documents.

Doubts about geographic reach Buying cloud services often introduces compliance issues. For instance, many laws, regulations and certifications require data and even applications to be physically located in a particular geographic area. If an SMB does business in multiple locations, it can't go to the cloud unless it can meet the relevant requirements wherever it operates. The IEEE initiative will help resolve such problems. To start with, if the SMB's cloud provider doesn't offer service in all the necessary locations, it will be able to use other providers that base their services on the same P2301 profile. And P2302 standards will ensure that the different providers' services can communicate with one another.

Inability to get multiple applications that work at the same time One big obstacle to SMBs' adoption of cloud services is that the kind of services that they are likely to find most compelling don't but exist. In particular, during individual cloud computing apps may be useful on their own, their power and usefulness increases dramatically when they are integrated with other apps. And currently such integration is difficult and complicated to accomplish.

For example, today it's possible to buy a cloud-based CRM service from one provider, and a cloud-based call center service from another, and have them work at the same time. This provides such benefits as allowing call center employees to see both the calling history and the transaction records of a customer on the same screen, and to use the combined capabilities of the applications to help the customer effectively.

First, SMBs are massively adopting Cloud Services. Second, your integration example makes it seem that VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) PBXes integrate with on Premise CRM systems as a trivial mannner. Third, intertia is the correct answer.

I am undoubtedly happy that somebody is off making standards in cloud computing, even though they won't catch up to the edge of development for many years. Nevertheless picking the same things that are wrong with on-premise services and saying that they are the same for clouds is pretty funny.