We think this is an important article for all public relations practitioners who work in the area of social media marketing and social media strategy. What we have edited here is written by Andrew McAfee and is a well thought out analysis of the cloud. The original full length article can be found in the Harvard Business Review.
What Every CEO Needs to Know About the Cloud
In 2010 an IBM survey of more than 1,500 CEOs worldwide revealed a troubling gap: Close to 80% of them believed their environment would grow much more complex in the coming years, but fewer than half thought their companies were well equipped to deal with this shift. The survey team called it “the largest leadership challenge identified in eight years of research.”
Unfortunately, the information technology infrastructure at many large companies only makes this challenge more difficult.
Cloud computing is a sharp departure from the status quo.
How important is cloud computing? I would argue that it’s a sea change—a deep and permanent shift in how computing power is generated and consumed.
Benefits of the Cloud: Some people maintain that there’s nothing magic about the cloud—that anything it can do, on-premise approaches can also accomplish. That argument is correct in theory, at least for large companies. Such companies can buy or build software for collaboration or analytics—or anything else—and install it in their own data centers. They can—but they rarely do.
Facilitating collaboration: In fact, some of cloud computing’s greatest successes to date have come from allowing groups and communities to work together in ways that were not previously possible.
Cost. The widespread uncertainty about the cloud may be most apparent in debates over its comparative cost.
Reliability. Whether or not the cloud is cheaper, many skeptics hold that it’s not as reliable as a well-managed on-premise infrastructure. The infrastructure you control, they argue, is more stable than the one you don’t.
Security. It’s true that transmissions can be intercepted; firewalls can be breached; viruses, worms, and other forms of malware can invade. However, this is true for every computer network, including the ones that companies run themselves.
Conclusion: As the cloud grows and matures, its vendors will continue to innovate and to differentiate their offerings. The only way to learn about them firsthand is to start moving into the cloud.
This is what we at Wilkinson Group are doing.
