Has your industry embraced the cloud?

In a recent post   Gordon Ritter, founder and general partner at Emergence Capital,  highlights the state of cloud adoption in industries. along with a few popular cloud vendors for the specific industries. As per the article, two top industries leading cloud adoption are healthcare and education. Mr. Ritter also outlines the various factors that weigh-in for quicker cloud adoption or otherwise.

While agreeing to the tone of the article, there are specifics that I think are also imminent. That has everything to do with the overheads and cost.

• IT industries today rely on big data centers with their own political influence and indeterminable risk-taking abilities. While developers and maintainers at Google and Amazon data centers focus heavily on innovation and have big budgets backing that, the primary function of the internal data centers is to ‘maintain’. In the medium to long term, the disadvantage of not innovating enough and not innovating fast, will be detrimental to the organization’s ability to respond faster to situations
• While cloud services cost more than an internally deployed application over a period of time, the real value that does not get enough attention is the ability to change. No matter which industry you are today, the one thing that is rapidly changing is the technology ecosystem. Companies end up not recognising this ability to change and may miss out on the possible optimizations that will be faster
• The cost of cloud services can only head south. Computing is more and more viewed as a utility service, and a typical consumer (read individuals) are fully making use of that already. Today, I don’t bother with how much of memory, processing power, disk space or which type of software is needed for my email, for the documents that I share with others, or for the websites I maintain. The cost is negligible, the efficiency is just perfect and the ubiquity of information is an expected

When efficiency, cost and the ability to change fast is in question, I see the rest of the factors going away, if only more slowly in some industries. Cloud computing is the future folks, and consumers are leading the way. Has your industry embraced the cloud yet?