IDC Says Cloud Computing Used as a "Stop-Gap"

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The IDC recently spoke out that businesses should only use cloud computing as a “stop-gap” measure to help them survive cost pressures during the recession.  According to their research, cloud computing services only provided short-term cost savings. The research also highlights that within three years of implementing software as a service measures, large businesses regularly found the costs of doing so to exceed that of running their own gear.

Cloud costs need to come down much further to be a realistic long term option,” said Matthew McCormack, IDC analyst, at the company’s recent Cloud Computing Summit in London. “It could be useful in the short term financially for companies with severe cost overruns.””Your datacentre would have to be really poorly run for it to be more expensive than cloud in the long run,” he added.

McCormack went on to advise that businesses should look at their capital and operational costs over the last five years as well as analyze their datacenter workload efficiencies before making hard decisions on cloud implementations.  The IDC report predicts that cloud computing costs will eventually fall as more vendors enter the pool.

This is an interesting blow to the cloud computing hype.  We often see analysts, pundits and pontificators capitalize on the latest buzzword and preach the next revolution in technology.  Rarely do we see analysts present empirical data against a given buzzword tech item that suggests its just not made for everyone.  For more info on the report, read the ComputerWorldUK writeup here.