Consumers led enterprise to the cloud

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Cloud computing in the business world has consumers to thank for its introduction, according to a Microsoft executive.

During a parliament-sponsored debate in Westminster this morning, Stephen McGibbon, regional technology officer for Microsoft in Europe, claimed the cloud is now the trend on everyone's lips because of the wide adoption in the consumer market.

Revealing huge figures from Microsoft's own cloud offerings – 1.3 billion Hotmail mailboxes or 40 million people logged onto Windows Live Messenger at one time – McGibbon said: “When we talk about cloud we have to manage infrastructure and services at that kind of scale... typically these kinds of services are end user centric and nobody comes in between a consumer and the service they are looking for.”

“What is happening at that kind of scale is starting to have an impact on enterprises and [the consumer] is why cloud computing is a topic is being talked about so much today,” he added.

McGibbon admitted the challenges and responsibilities when it comes to cloud computing are very different for consumers and enterprises, but for Government IT, users of the cloud should have that same experience as they would on any consumer website.

“Because these things are about scale you have to start talking about shared infrastructure/services,” he added, “and where Government has been delivering in a departmental way [it] will have to start looking at infrastructure as a horizontal capability.”

“So the real impact on Government IT will be [that it will] have to look at model, define its processes and how to automate it. From an end user perspective it should be transparent meaning it shouldn't be any different.”

McGibbon concluded: “This is not the end of the client/server model, it is an evolution of client/server. We are only at the beginning of this journey... and this evolution will take five to seven years to really understand and take advantage of what this tech can deliver.”

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