By Randy Davis, VP (rdavis@egisticsinc.com) (www.egisticsinc.com)
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, known for his eyebrow raising antics at company-wide employee meetings, is raising eyebrows again with his provocative and far-reaching statements about Microsoft and the cloud. On July 12 Ballmer told 9,500 attendees at the annual partners’ conference that “if you don’t want to move to the cloud, we’re not your folks.” The cloud, he says, is “inevitable.” Whew. Actually, even in the summer of 2008 Microsoft recognized that on-line delivery of critical business applications and services was, in fact, “a sea change” in the way businesses and corporations want to be served. On-line delivery was then and is now recognized as part of a “services wave” that is causing some to criticize the traditional software-based delivery model and on-premise execution of business applications as growing “antiquated.”
Maybe yes, maybe no.
Ballmer acknowledges what corporations have been concerned about since the cloud began to form: security and compliance. He implies that companies that get this right are “way ahead” in providing a viable offering to the market.
This brings up a good point in the use and selection of on-line services companies: Choosing one that provides an on-line service is one thing; choosing one that has invested the time, cost, expertise and infrastructure required to provide world-class security, and that supports a variety of compliance mandates, is quite another.
It is our experience that large, security- and compliance-conscious institutions are taking advantage of the growing maturity of cloud services, especially in the area of the management of documents, transactional data, payment images, and reports. As institutions become more comfortable with, and confident in, selective cloud providers, expectations will increase regarding the use of such information for fraud detection and prevention, data mining, analysis, legal discovery, research and customer service.
Is your company catching the wave, dipping its toes in the water, or staying high and dry?
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