38 | The Sunday Business Post | September 2015

THE NEXT EPISODETHE AIR UP THERECLOUD COMPUTING

s the cloud developed and split into clouds of clouds and an ev-

er-wider range of services, it is fair to say that the expertise began to be confined to a large degree within the cloud ser-

vice providers, consultants and ICT service companies. Even the traditional large corporate IT departments in banks or multinationals or government do not really have anything like a full set of cloud skills and experience.

In the more typical Irish business, from micro to medium, even those which traditionally had at least a small IT team – usually be-cause their sector was heavily tech-dependent – there is minimal if any cloud ex-pertise. “That is why there is more and more interest in managed cloud services at all levels, from the first steps to what is as near as makes no difference IT-as-a-Service,” said Paul Kane, interim marketing director of Servecentric, the data centre and provider of IT services since 2002.

“The point is that man-aging cloud services is the equivalent of ‘keeping the lights on’ and by and large does not contribute directly to the success of the business. So we take on that role for them. Most of it is essentially a commodity service, a cost to the business, so an out-sourced managed service is effective and economic and offers economy of scale and skills.

“One new customer re-cently said it bluntly to us: ‘we want one throat to choke.’ Organisations today are accustomed to buying services, to contracts and SLAs, and the fact that some of the ICT services are in the cloud is irrelevant to their choice of a local, trustworthy supplier. We have seen out-sourcing failures ourselves, where responsibilities were ill-defined and there was no central leadership and it didn’t end well.

“One of the facts about cloud that is seldom ac-knowledged is that many business leaders think that somehow the normal rules of business and the experience of decades of buying IT no longer apply,” Kane said.

“Setting about moving to-wards the cloud and buying cloud services is no different in principle from traditional ICT. You examine, you plan, you specify, you take advice, you decide your priorities and then you find ways of testing step by step. You are

purchasing an appropriate set of computing resources for your organisation. Only the technology has changed.”

Dediserve is an indigenous company that has specialised in cloud for its seven years in business, specifically in high-end enterprise solu-tions. It now has 15 locations throughout Europe, the US and Asia and over 3,500 cli-ents, including blue chips like the AA, OPW, the Irish Times, MyHome.ie and major ele-ments of the NHS in Britain.

“We were essentially pub-lic cloud for most of that time but have now introduced private and hybrid options as the cloud market and the technology has developed and matured,” said Aidan McCarron, MD and founder.

As general understanding of what cloud can accomplish has deepened, there is now more focus on mixing and matching tasks and work-loads, choosing what is the best fit from a range of op-tions.

“Organisations are seeing cloud from the point of view of business value – not just the simple economics but the flexibility and opportu-nities for continuous change and improvement. They see how they can choose vari-ous cloud options and bundle them together into a man-aged package that suits their current needs,” McCarron said.

“These are companies that understand the business val-ue of IT, indeed totally depend on it, but they do not want to manage it because their business focus is somewhere else. In that context we are a one-stop cloud shop that will architect and package and manage what the client wants. It is in essence tailored IT-as-a-Service.”

The question of specialist cloud computing skills has become a dominant one in the sector in recent years

A

Setting about moving towards the cloud and buying cloud services is no different in principle from traditional ICT

Paul Kane, interim marketing director of Servecentric, the data centre and provider of IT services

Aidan McCarron,

managing director

and founder,

Dediserve