An increasingly popular concept in business circles, the cloud market is booming although still at the beginning of its journey. With such a large number of IT specialists in Romania, it is expected that the evolution will be rapid and the market will quickly understand and adopt such solutions that can help companies of any size enormously.
“In cloud adoption it’s all about business. You always have to look at the three performance indicators: growth, cost and efficiency. The problem is that companies in the region are looking at the cloud as a technology thing which is wrong, it should start from the business. In Western Europe it’s different because people start from the business, but it all depends on who runs the IT department. The IT director talks to the CEO, and some of them see the cloud as business and some as technology. If they still think of the cloud as a technology they won’t have arguments in front of management and everything gets stuck,” Ana Radosevic, Hewlett-Packard’s cloud segment manager for Southeast Europe, told Wall-Street.ro.
The term cloud covers a wide field, from cloud computing to a suite of applications accessible without owning equipment on the company’s premises, and is experiencing an exponential evolution of solutions that can be implemented in the day-to-day activity of a company; for large companies it can mean a significant reduction in costs and for small companies it allows access to services that previously could not be accessed, as their cost was prohibitive.
“Installing a business solution on a cloud platform has the following advantages: lower total investment, flexibility (you can choose the features you want), low cost (you pay for what and how much you use), fast deployment, security, mobility (it can be accessed from anywhere a Wi-Fi network is accessible, on any device that has a web browser installed). Compared to Romania, where cloud installations for SMEs are still few, the trend in the region is that business solutions, such as ERP, for example, are presented exclusively as requiring a cloud installation” said Liviu Buligan, Executive Manager SoftOne Romania for Wall-Street.ro.
The extremely rapid technological evolution of recent years is not easy to follow even for specialists, so it is no wonder that legislation is not keeping pace. Rapid alignment of legislation is a necessity if the adoption of cloud solutions is not to be blocked and SMEs’ access to such services is to be facilitated; ultimately this is to the benefit of the end consumer, leading to increased competition in the market.
“We’re living in a time when you’re going to see IT change radically. If until some time ago IT was less important and everything was based on on-premises infrastructure, […] now we are going to see an extremely strong change, everything is going to go to the cloud area.[…]By 2020, about 45% of IT companies’ budgets will be spent on cloud services. […] The cloud may sound fancy, and at a conceptual level I can agree with that. But the cloud is like a one-way street, and there is no turning back. Sooner or later this will happen. I think the Romanian market is a raw one, but one that understands this concept well. We are facing problems in the local market related to legal issues, […] risk management issues and issues related to national and European legislation that are not keeping pace with the speed at which technology is developing. It is clear that the big global companies will implement this cloud concept faster and then roll it out to all the branches in the countries where they operate. Once adopted at headquarters level, it is clear that they will eventually reach Eastern Europe and, including Romania”, said Dan Popa, Virtualization and Cloud Lead of Microsoft Romania, to Business Magazin.
