Will the cloud ever truly make its mark on the enterprise?

For all the benefits of cloud services there remains a perception that the cloud is not necessarily for the enterprise. Sure, major enterprises use the odd SaaS and host certain non-critical data in the cloud. But for the most part they remain wedded to old ways of working and leave the cloud to younger, smaller and more innovative organisations.

Yet some industries are more receptive to the cloud than other, so what can be done to get others amongst the world’s largest companies to consider the cloud? Perhaps the answer lies in offering the flexibility of the cloud in combination with traditional methodologies to truly get the enterprise on board.

Are large enterprises still sceptical about the cloud?
Perhaps any scepticism about the cloud on the part of bigger organisations is a trust issue. People like keeping the important things close to them and don’t yet trust the idea of storing mission-critical data in the cloud.

But perceived issues with security and data privacy around the cloud are simply no longer true, if they ever were. Not using cloud because they don’t trust it is a major missed opportunity. Adopting the cloud can have a positive impact on businesses of all sizes and there is no reason that larger enterprises shouldn’t benefit too.

A vertical approach to cloud adoption
Levels of cloud adoption do depend on the nature of each vertical market. A recent report from industry analyst organisation Frost & Sullivan - Cloud in European Vertical Markets – looked at how different vertical markets differed in their take-up of cloud services.

The report highlighted how retail was the most advanced sector, ahead of healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and the energy sector. The findings suggested this was because of the seasonal nature of retail. This means bigger retailers especially require more flexibility in their back-end systems as well as more front-end applications such as mobile inventory tracking that are usually delivered on cloud-based platforms.

Retail is also a relatively early adopter of social and mobile tools, which generates an enormous volume of customer data. The analytics technology required to analyse this big data and gain insight into customer behaviour requires more performance than any virtual environment can deliver. Which is why our Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offers the best of both worlds for retailers and other industries.

Bigstep and retail
In our conversations with prospects and customers we’ve certainly noticed that retailers are more open to considering cloud services and they understand that analysing big data requires significant computing power.

So our IaaS comes with no hypervisor, which means customers can benefit from the raw power of bare metal. Hypervisors drain performance and we want to deliver the faster and most powerful big data infrastructure possible.

We know though, that enterprises don’t necessarily need such levels of computing power all the time, so offer an innovative pricing structure that allows them to pay-per-hour. This is attractive to smaller enterprises of course, but surely larger firms are also interested in more flexible pricing and only paying for what they actually use?

Pure cloud infrastructures do not offer enough power so cloud flexibility combined with the power of bare metal is perhaps key to enterprise cloud adoption. Retailers have shown the way in cloud adoption, which other industries will follow?