All the Right Reasons for not adopting the Cloud (Scientifically speaking, of course)

“Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief” - Sigmund Freud

Last week I participated in an expert-panel in a Cloud-meeting for CIOs. The conference started with an hour long CIO panel, then the vendors displayed their goods and finally, the expert panel.

What was obvious, was that different CIOs had completely differing opinions on whether Cloud should be embraced or not. There were those that were completely for Cloud and were actively seeking how to consume more Cloud services while others explained why the idea was mostly ludicrous.

When asked to summarize my impression of the meeting, my observation was that the difference in attitude towards embracing Cloud and SaaS had nothing to do with the size, or business or  type of enterprise these CIOs were representing, but with the psychological makeup of the CIO.

Perfect Reasoning
If you are for the Cloud, then the TCO and ROI clearly indicate that Cloud is the logical choice. If you are against the Cloud, you could prove how it ends up being more expensive.

If you do not want to adopt SaaS you can always pull out the regulatory winning card.

If you are for Cloud, you can talk about the flexibility of using SaaS. If you are against, you talk about how inflexible SaaS is without the ability to customize.

If you are a SaaS seeker, you tell the audience how much better the security of SaaS providers was than your own facility, but if you feel threatened by SaaS, you bring up those horror stories to justify not going there.

Que Sera Sera
I have no doubt that the train has left the station and that the old-school CIOs will, with time, become a minority. But then, you still hear some scientists arguing that Global Warming is fiction and they have scientific proof.
I don’t know what the future will look like, and what trends will dominate a decade from now, but Cloud is here to stay. Mind you, there are still mainframes running business on COBOL code, forty years later, so one would assume that on-premise will still be around in one way or another.

But as for the arguments, like religion, faith and whether the Sun revolves around Earth, no “scientific proof” will be able to change people’s minds.