Business heads in the cloud

How do customers really see the future of cloud computing? An Entrepreneurship Week event brought together four business leaders to answer the question. Fleur Doidge reports

It sounds like the start of a bad joke: a Tech City leader, a former City banker, a business publisher, an online video analytics specialist and ex-Dragon James Caan came together this month to discuss whether or not cloud computing really does represent the future of UK business.

James Caan (pictured, above), known to many from Dragons' Den, the BBC show for fledgeling entrepreneurs, and chief executive of Mayfair investor Hamilton Bradshaw, told the Global Entrepreneurship Week panel in London that cloud is no passing fancy. In fact, his view is that it offers a beacon of hope to business in these tough times. "Cloud will, I think, play a significant part in the UK's recovery," he said.

Cloud is offering greater agility and flexibility to all manner of businesses - enabling them to adapt and grow faster and more efficiently than ever before. "Once when you moved offices you typically ended up spending £100,000 to £250,000 on upgrading all the IT. Now you can have a bigger, stronger, smarter system that will cost substantially less," Caan said. "There is no question that will have a substantial impact on business."

Cloud computing skills themselves are also in demand, he said, pointing to his own digital marketing recruitment venture Gemini, which has more jobs available than candidates to fill them. "And, for the first time, you can be a young person and start a business for £5,000 to £6,000. It used to run into the hundreds of thousands. And you are able to do that because you are using cloud computing," Caan said.

Anne Boden (pictured, below), former head of EMEA global transaction services at the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, said cloud was making her "very excited about the future and what is going to happen next". As a computer science graduate with a lifelong career in banking, she said she understood that people are concerned about security and whether they can trust cloud with sensitive or important information. However, Boden added, cloud could often prove more trustworthy than the human brain.

"Security is about individuals. It is about whether somebody has followed a procedure. I use the cloud because I can trust somebody else to do the backup and to upgrade the software, for example. I cannot trust myself to do that, on the other hand, because I have too many other things to think about," she explained.

Furthermore, banks will prefer building their own private clouds. They will not get involved in public cloud, Boden confirmed.

Anthony Rushton, co-founder of Telemetry, said his company would not have been able to find its niche without cloud. It eased the way to real-time analytics delivery, which enabled customers to understand how advertisements were being responded to, and react more quickly and effectively.

It also enabled Telemetry to get rid of time-consuming, unnecessary processes, he said, but the company would go on building its own infrastructure where needed as well.

"We use the cloud to augment physical development. Spending on cloud services can be much cheaper," Rushton said. "But leaving it all up to large US hosts is dangerous."

Growth through agility

Eric van der Kleij, chief executive of the government's Tech City Investment Organisation, said innovative businesses facilitated by cloud computing are currently one of the few expanding sectors. "When the prime minister embraced Tech City last year, it was in recognition that companies on site can deliver some of this growth we need," he said.

Richard Alvin, group managing director of business publisher Capital Business Media, said his company had been investing in cloud since attending a Salesforce.com forum in 2009. Some 20,000 people had attended, and this year, 48,000 had gone along. Cloud coupled savings with agility, Alvin said.

Gary Gallagher, director of mobile apps start-up Paper Bag, attended the talk and uses cloud for a range of applications, including project management and accounting.

He claimed not much was said by the panel that he did not already know.

"Basically, with cloud you can be more efficient. Although there is an overriding concern with trust in terms of backup and security," he said.

Over time, though, those issues would be resolved, Gallagher added.