Corporate Cloud Computing Forecast: Partly Cloudy

Perceived risk relative to cost, reliability, and security will keep many corporate executives from bold moves in favor of Cloud solutions, says Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and  the author of Enterprise 2.0,  in this informative HBR article. However, staying behind such fundamental shift which McAfee likens to the shift from steam to electric power in manufacturing, can cost a company’s competitive advantage.  He argues that if  Cloud’s impact was on corporate IT budgets only, the implication would be minor, but  as his research has shown, this is not the case.

“Cloud computing offers advantages in, at a minimum, productivity, collaboration, analytics, and application development.   How valuable are these? It’s hard to measure, but here’s some food for thought: How would you feel if your main competitors started pulling away from you in those areas simply by changing their computing infrastructure? And how much worse would it be if this change created other benefits that are not yet obvious? One common feature of major technological shifts is that their full effects are not visible at first. For example, it was inconceivable at the dawn of factory electrification that a separate motor might one day be placed on every machine in the plant, yet this is exactly what eventually happened.”