The focus of this blog is to look at the impact cloud computing can have on the business. At Radiant, we sell our hosted exchange, cloud computing and business internet services to mid-sized companies across Canada. We often meet with prospective CFOs or CEOs during our sales cycle. What we find interesting about the dynamic today is that the CIOs or IT Directors or IT Managers – depending on company size – are the ones identifying cloud computing as a viable way of becoming more responsive to the business and cutting cost. They are the ones bringing these solutions to the CFO.

This has been a bit of a shift in the last few years. IT is definitely seeing that they don’t provide any business value by hosting everyday applications like Email and CRM when they could be focused on the core IT systems that differentiate the business.

What we’d like to see is more CFOs driving the cloud computing question to less forward looking IT departments. The problem is that all the cloud computing messaging out there is technically focused. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has by far the largest cloud computing footprint in the market but is 100% targeted at developers and IT professionals that have the skills to programmatically manage these services. They don’t talk about data security and service level agreements (SLAs) that are designed to protect the customer.

To this end, there is a great introductory paper written by the cloud group at Deloitte that is focused on cloud computing for the CFO. Right off the top it identifies the potential impact of cloud computing on finance:

Cloud computing presents a significant opportunity
because it allows companies to reduce the capital costs
of information technology. It allows companies to buy
computing literally by the drink, converting the cost of
computing from capital expenditures to primarily an
operating expense.

For many of us this isn’t anything new, but they go on to provide some concrete questions that the CFO can ask IT about getting started with cloud computing:

Is there a strategy to use cloud computing as part of the IT services mix? What areas create the greatest opportunities for savings now?

This is good advice, walk before you run. The most recent Gartner survey on SaaS adoption shows that more than 95 percent of organizations expect to maintain or grow their use of software as a service (SaaS). Companies of all sizes need to identify the ways that cloud computing and cloud applications can help their IT departments deliver core services better.

For many Radiant customers they choose to migrate their e-mail services to our AlwaysThere Hosted Exchange Offering or turn up a couple of AlwaysThere Virtual Servers instead of buying new hardware. There are many options for starting gradually before sending your entire datacentre packing and buying an AlwaysThere  Private Cloud or Virtual Datacentre. (Although that’s not a bad idea either).

The short paper has some great advice for CFOs. You can get the entire paper on the Deloitte Website