According to Silicon Angle, U.S. businesses will spend $13 billion on cloud computing and managed hosting services in 2014, with end users spending $180 billion worldwide on public cloud services by 2015.
These two figures alone make a compelling argument that the business world’s move to cloud technology is fait accompli, but other information suggests otherwise. For a number of reasons, many businesses and organizations have not moved to the cloud.
Law Technology Today suggests that the decision to move to the cloud is one that the industry should not take lightly. Firms heavily dependent on a non-cloud version of time and billing system software -- that have had servers for fewer than their ROI time of three years and have slow or unreliable Internet service -- should stay the course with their own servers. The federal government has also been slow to adopt cloud technology, but that’s starting to change.
What’s it going to take for the holdouts to upgrade? Changing the pricing model would be one huge step, according to Forbes’ Gene Marks. A smaller business with 20 users paying $100 per user per month will pay $24,000 a year for cloud service. It’s a lot cheaper to set up your own server and handle your own IT in that scenario.
ZDNet’s Ken Hess makes the argument that it’s high time companies modernized and those that have not are behind the times. Companies that have been running on outdated operating systems and old hardware need to decommission such systems and begin upgrading immediately. These businesses need to also get past the trepidation that comes with using new technology.
For the time being, it looks like there will be a few holdouts to move to the cloud, but even if the business is a one-man show, there are still cloud apps like Dropbox (News - Alert) and OneDrive that are affordable, if not free, and offer the protections against hard drive crashes and other problems that the cloud solves. Even SalesForce has a contact manager option that would be affordable to a single user environment at $60 per year. The reasons for standing pat with older technology are eroding and it’s only a matter of time before everyone is on board.