The decision is not without risk. Fisher concedes that he is at the mercy of the Internet in terms of reliability and performance, and still has questions about privacy.
"I feel reasonably comfortable, but it is a bit of a leap of faith that we are investing in a third-party that I haven't even met," Fisher says. "But that is just a comfort thing, and I think in time it will become more reliable and the privacy issues will be sorted out."
Obstacles to Adoption
The big end of town is also getting interested. The director of IBM Australia's development laboratory, Glenn Wightwick, says IBM is working with its clients to determine how they can best take advantage of the various cloud services available.
"Some of the universities are looking at their undergraduate e-mail systems and asking if they can work with Google or Microsoft or other providers for provision of e-mail to students," Wightwick says. "But the reality is you have to do quite a lot of engineering to your business processes to make those changes. To extend your security model out to the public cloud requires a bit of engineering."
Per-user licensing models are another problem. And then there are still the questions about application availability and performance across the Internet.
"Over time many of these things are going to be addressed, but they are some of the impediments that are going to slow down the adoption of cloud computing, to particularly larger enterprises," Wightwick says.
A recent cloud computing survey conducted by the integrator Avanade found that 53 percent of respondents were concerned about security issues, 41 percent were worried about poor support, and 33 percent were unhappy with the underlying lack of control.
According to Avanade's chief technology officer, Tyson Hartman, many of these issues have been faced and overcome before. "Organisations share sensitive data with business partners all the time -- payroll is one example," Hartman says.
"As consumers, we trust our data to banks, brokers and other service providers all the time. What makes this possible? Trust.
"As in past adoption waves, our customers are experimenting with cloud computing now and naturally doing so with non-mission critical data, but that doesn't mean that only non-mission critical workloads should be cloud-based. In fact, customers who move through this learning process the fastest are gaining the most benefit of being early movers to cloud computing."
Early Adopters
Whatever arguments against cloud computing there may be, they haven't been sufficient to dissuade some established companies from embracing cloud computing wholeheartedly.
Sydney-based company Altium has been creating software for the electronic design industry for more than 20 years. But with more than 300 staff spread across offices around the world, its IT group faced constant challenges in terms of supporting staff and customers.
Director of research projects Alan Perkins says the issue was made more urgent by the realisation in the mid part of this decade that Altium's proprietary ERP system wouldn't cut it.
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