Cloud computing is a significant trend with the potential to increase agility and lower costs. Today, however, security risks, immature technology, and other concerns prevent widespread enterprise adoption of external clouds.
As telecommunications service providers (SPs) attempt to offset declines in legacy revenues by moving into adjacent segments such as enterprise IT services, they may be overlooking an attractive and underserved market: the small- and medium-sized business (SMB) sector. To date, SPs have focused their efforts in the highly competitive market for enterprise IT services to build critical mass for service offerings.
Private and public clouds evolve the way IT services are delivered to the business. The promise of increased efficiency and agility of enterprise-class applications and services is intriguing, but enterprise customers are struggling with how cloud services can safely add realistic business value. The use of external cloud services challenge security and compliance, as well as service level management, which can involve multiple domains of control. Technology lock-in is an additional concern as various vendors deliver very different cloud computing offerings (and there are others of which you should be aware). The reality is that external cloud services are still working toward enterprise maturity.