Episode 1; 'The one where he introduces himself'

Welcome to 'The Clouded Issues'. This is a blog I decided to start in order to discuss the many issues facing Cloud Computing & Cloud services in the Irish market across all verticals, as witnessed from my own professional experience in Ireland's Cloud Computing Service Market.

I started being involved in Cloud services in Ireland back in 2007 when it was a little known concept that was new & also challenging to present in the Irish market, simply due to its being unknown when pitched against heavily established solutions such as colocation, dedicated servers or in-house hosted systems in comm's rooms, or 'the corner of the office'.

'Cloud' at that point was something that only really gained the attention of those atypical,  brave very early adopters, developers. But even then, as a concept it was largely defined by scalar/utility based computing, such as AWS, or the scalar, fixed term enterprise model that Hosting365 brought into the Irish market. Since then, Cloud has now taken on an extremely wide set of definitions & has become a buzz-word as many service providers try cash-in, & widen the scope of their service offerings, leveraged off existing investment, to maximise return on that same investment - much like the starting story & point  for Amazon's AWS.

Since my own start in this arena in 2007, I've witnessed the Irish market embrace cloud strongly, but the penetration levels when  compared to traditional hosted infrastructure models, or hosted/managed services still remain unattractive, mainly due to traditional services being 'the known quantity', rather than the market embracing a more powerful, utilitarian, scalar & more cost effective platform especially in these difficult times, where costs are so crucial to business survival, especially to SME's.

And yet, Irish SME's, with their ability to generally be more nimble & flexible than medium to large businesses in moving from traditional in-house hosted infrastructure, or even traditionally third-party hosted infrastrucutureto the cloud remains a challenge. Sure, cost is important, but one of the more concerned areas is 'control'. In larger organisations, the issues are more substantial, sometimes it is entrenched personnel, or entrenched work practices due to the investment; financial, human & knowledge/skills capital. Teaching an old dog new tricks sometimes even despite the benefits, sometimes is viewed as 'more trouble than it's worth'.

Without derailing what is essentially a 'welcome/hello world' post into a full blown discussion already,my points thus far should demonstrate some of the areas of Cloud Computing in Ireland I plan to blog about here on a regular basis. I will be allowing comments up on my posts, & will try my best to answer any questions or feedback.

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