Cloud computing has the potential to transform public and private sector industries by improving collaboration, communication, and sharing of information and resources. Community clouds, where organizations within an industry share cloud resources while maintaining trust, are an emerging approach. Emergency response apps like "I am Florence" demonstrate how clouds can help save lives by connecting those in need with available volunteers in the vicinity. Overall, clouds may simplify lives by addressing challenges across sectors if adoption starts in areas of clear benefit.
The new world order is a more connected, and more complex, world. More information is flowing more easily (intended and unintended) – which at its best can lead to better decision making, improved services for citizens, better engagement of citizens, economic growth through improved trading, and better allocation of resources to achieve a more sustainable future.
In 135+ years since telephony was introduced in India, the number of landlines is less than 36 million. In 10 years since mobile phones were launched, India has 720 million mobile phones.
This is where the Cloud comes in.The Cloud is great for cost reduction and agility (most people are already aware of this), and intrinsically it’s good at sharing (sharing information, processes etc etc) which in turn is good for business growth (like Amazon Marketplace) and also for better citizen services (Education cloud in France) etc. Note that France is focusing its government cloud on the benefits is brings to entrepreneurial working.The cloud is about sharing – to save costs and to help information flow. But sharing requires trust – different organisations are at different stages in being comfortable doing that. Some businesses are concerned about security and geography (local regulation for privacy & data protection) are important. That’s been brought into focus by Wikileaks – not just that the information was suddenly widely available, but that reputable organisations (Amazon, credit card companies) suffered attacks, and elected (political agenda as well as commercial) to withdraw service. That has set (non US) companies thinking about who should be their service provider in the new order world.We help organisations work through these issues, but it is certainly true that an organisation’s DNA is a strong indicator of whether they are ready for the cloud. For example,we’ve put a social network into a Bank – which you’d expect to have the strongest issues with security and sharing. That was done with a private cloud, which gave the assurance they required while being able to become more “modern”.
Looking at the potential role of cloud computing per industry sector , Government is the only sector that sees partially different roles for cloud computing (service excellence and revenue maximization)In general, most industries see business cost reduction and business access to technology as the primary roles for cloud computing.Just to give you an example of an Insurance Group who are making great use of the Cloud - Fennia, the Finnish Insurance Group, were asked by their brokers to provide an electronic communication channel to streamline the business process between them. The need was to simplify and shorten the time for case management on both sides. Fennia wanted an innovative solution that would differentiate them from their competitors and could be deployed rapidly.We worked with them to deploy a Cloud solution that included Integration, Content Management and Portal as a Service modules.Fennia have already seen increased customer satisfaction and differentiation in the market. They also received feedback that this is the most advanced service that insurance companies can offer in Finland.As to the initial brief, there is improved productivity for both Fennia and their brokers. Less manual work, easier to find the correct information and simpler to update it. True two-way communication.They have also seen cost savings through reduced manual labour, printing and mailing. Rapid deployment and foreseeable cost structure that scales based on use through cloud services.Some wider examples include Google doing detection of flu epidemics based on people’s search queries.
Many enterprises are learning to adopt these principles, but we are moving from pioneering to colonisation. Around 20% of our client interactions mention the cloud – they may not choose it just yet, but clients want to know there is a path to the cloud, and they are not about to build the last dinosaur. And in some areas they are moving rapidly – for CRM in France 100% of requests ask for a cloud option, and 50% select it. And Finland has been doing this for a long time. Finland as a country will benefit more from cloud also because it tops the world in deployment of broadband.