Comment Neelie (Kroes)
Making speeches talk
[...] All these issues – standards, certification, data protection, interoperability, lock-in, legal certainty and others – are particularly troublesome for smaller companies. They are the ones who stand to benefit the most from the Cloud – but who don't have a lot of spending power, nor resources for individual negotiations with Cloud suppliers.
These issues are and can be addressed already today. Although from an economical, green-IT perspective, not only SME's should focuss on these objectives.
SV, 26/01/2012 12:10
One of the dangers and one of the barriers to adoption of cloud technology by SMEs and Communities is the focus of supply in the hands of a few, large, multinational organisations. They control not only the cloud but also the channels of access. We should explore the potential for a more democratised method of supply where we facilitate small, local clouds (possible locally owned??) which can create trust and, because they exist at a level below the major suppliers,can be robust.
The alternative is to place local economies at the mercy of a small number of global players and this will continue to be a barrier to adoption by SMEs.
Paul Nash, 26/01/2012 12:59
I think we paint with broad strokes here - as much as I love the SME, why is it that "they stand to benefit the most"?
Of course it opens up some fantastic options in terms of SaaS but what else?
They are the ones at risk of jumping into the deep end, into a pool where the enterprise sharks are the ones who really save money in efficiency savings from cloud computing.
ComputeNext.com, 26/01/2012 23:33
