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EDITOR’S QUESTION
SAHIL REKHI,
EMEA MD, RINGCENTRAL
T
he argument around whether
cloud would eventually become
a mainstream option has been
decided. Even within conservative realms
such as financial services, the move towards
placing apps, workflow and data into clouds
hosted by the likes of AWS, Microsoft and
Google is accelerating and it seems likely
that within a decade, more than 90% of
all applications will be delivered at least
partially from public or private clouds. Within
the enterprise, the two big areas of change
are focused at the desktop experience of
staff and the back-end activities of IT teams.
The desktop shift
The rise of cloud has intersected with an
ongoing trend towards more flexible and
agile working. What was, in earlier times,
called teleworking is now commonplace with
organisations understanding the productivity
benefit of hot-desking, collaborative hubs
and working hours that extend outside of the
traditional nine-to-five. This agility means
that enterprise employees expect to be able
to share apps, documents and workflows
from anywhere, with anyone, while using
any device. The new joiners expect access to
an Office 365 instance, a full UC suite and
shared collaborative cloud workspace.
On-premise to the cloud
Behind the scenes, IT departments –
many of whom were initially doubtful
of cloud computing – have found their
fears unfounded and a number of major
advantages. Concerns over cloud security and
availability have not materialised with all of
the big three cloud providers delivering almost
unrivalled availability and data security when
compared to on-premise legacy deployments.
In an era that saw the rise of BYOD, cloud
has been both a catalyst and enabler
with the ability to extend the reach of
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applications and security policies while
reducing the complexity of device support.
Cloud also helped promote centralised
managed and information life cycle
processes which were starting to become
unwieldly in the more device-centric and
largely on-premise world.
UC – a cloud pioneer
One of the biggest areas of change has been
within communication and collaboration.
What started with VoIP has morphed into
entire suites of applications that support
voice, video, data, CTI, contact centre and
a whole host of other use cases that are
delivered from the cloud. The old CAPEX
burden of buying a big PBX and sweating
assets over a decade long upgrade cycle has
given way to a per-user-per-month scalable
model with more features and faster ROI. The
pace of change in communication is rapid,
with data from Synergy research showing on-
premise communication declining at 11% a
year, while cloud UC is growing at 27%.
“
THE CLOUD ERA
IS FOSTERING
NEW WAYS OF
WORKING AND
MANAGERS RIGHT
UP TO C-LEVEL
WILL BENEFIT
FROM EMBRACING
THE CHANGE.
Cloud challenges
Yet cloud does have some challenges. There is
still limited amount of inter-cloud integration
as the big three in the industry compete to
build and define an ecosystem of partners
and technologies. In certain situations, this
might mean CIO’s have to commit to a
degree of lock-in that some hoped cloud
would eliminate. There is also a shortage of
people with the right skill sets to integrate
cloud-based technologies with more bespoke
applications within the growing area of hybrid
IT. This shortage is diminishing, but cloud
skills are still at a premium. Another challenge,
or more accurately, change, is within
management approach. The cloud era is
fostering new ways of working and managers
right up to C-Level will benefit from embracing
the change and leading the charge through
the adoption of new communication,
collaboration and management practices.
This shift to the cloud is full steam ahead and
innovative leaders that are able to embrace
and harness cloud technology and processes
early on will benefit the most from a long-
term perspective.
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