What to consider with online IT

Cloud computing is wispy and mysterious, one of the latest hot ideas for business about which many top executives are dubious. In Harvard Business Review, Andrew McAfee, principal innovation scientist at MIT’s Center for Digital Business, shares these points for senior execs to consider when weighing whether to move more information innovation online to servers hosted by other organizations:

The same time in ways not before possible

Some of cloud computing’s greatest successes have come from allowing groups to work at the same time in ways not before possible. For instance, afterwards Virginia-based consulting firm CSC turned to Jive, a maker of cloud-based collaboration software, more than 25,000 people registered, creating 2,100 groups. CSC’s president called the results "stunning" and added, "It’s the de facto standard for how we collaborate. It’s the language of the company."

Before the cloud, software developers needed to buy, configure and maintain their own servers, which was a distraction from the core activity of writing good code. When Minnesota-based 3M Co. turned to the Windows Azure cloud platform when making its Visual Attention Service software tools available to graphic designers, 3M gained the possibility to add capacity quickly and easily, with no capital. The cloud allows companies to increase the scale and power of their IT and the speed at which it can be accessed and deployed, with limited headaches.

Findings about costs – whether moving to the cloud saves or adds money – have been contradictory. However Dr. McAfee argues that over time, economics of building and maintaining a research infrastructure will favour the cloud because of the advantages of scale, as costs go down.

It’s big news when Google or Amazon goes down. But as a matter of fact the Radicati Group, a innovation market innovation firm in Palo Alta, Calif., estimates that Google’s Gmail is 32 times more reliable than the average corporate e-mail system.