Cloud technology is disruptive. Out go vast ‘on-premise’ data centres, in come applications served from the cloud – often under innovative pay-as-you-go ‘software as service’ licences.
Put another way, out go the large chunks of capital expenditure associated with physical data centres, together with software licences, both in utility-sized volumes. In their place: month-by-month rental costs, paid for out of operating expense.
Nor is cloud technology delivering just any old applications. Increasingly, software vendors are adopting ‘cloud first’ or even ‘cloud only’
deployment models.
However, utility companies are not all embracing the cloud in the same way, or even for the same reasons, and to the same extent. Look closely, and there are significant differences in the ways the companies perceive, approach and adopt cloud technology.
Why is this? Research carried out in March and April 2016 by Utility Week and Tata Consultancy Services sought to find out by probing utilities’ take-up of cloud technology, and their perceptions of the challenges and opportunities that it provides.
One obvious conclusion is that there is an opportunity for the utility sector to benefit from gaining a better understanding of best practice in managing cloud technology’s complexity and challenges.
Simply put, the utility sector needs help first of all to understand how best to approach and plan the migration to cloud technology. Then it must undertake the implementation and ongoing management of cloud platforms.
As the joint Utility Week and TCS report, Cloud adoption and UK utilities, highlights, there is little doubt among utility companies about the potential value that cloud technology could deliver to their businesses. The challenge lies in overcoming some of the barriers that stand in the way of achieving that value.