Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

I recently attended a briefing at the offices of IRIS, where IRIS introduced their new hosting proposition which targets amongst others the Not For profit Sector. The presentation was well attended by IT managers from a number of existing IRIS clients who I believe found the presentation interesting and informative.

The approach adopted by IRIS to deliver the message was to set the scene by describing some of the familiar benefits and objections associated to the delivery of IT via a cloud hosting as opposed to a more traditional internal approach. There was some mention of free additional features to support NFP clients, this upon examination amounted initially to web analytics. Iris also offered to spin up a free test environment where users were upgrading from Integra 3.4 to NG. There was a notable increase in interest from a couple of existing clients as they opportunistically spotted the potential to move problematic tasks from local to IRIS hosting, for example Web Sync. When asked if Concept could be hosted via the Cloud proposition, IRIS were not yet certain. It was interesting from my perspective that IRIS seemed to place a lot of emphasis on the importance of establishing the way to get out of an arrangement at the end of a contract. Of equal interest was the way that IRIS presented a competitive differentiator for their proposition, by offering to host none IRIS software once certified. This is of course in addition to hosting the IRIS suite including upgrades, patches and bug fixes.

There was clearly a mixed level of awareness of what such a hosting arrangement represented to potential clients; there was significant interest in the costing model proposed, but also a strong concern was raised connected to the capacity of the IRIS application support structure to cope with increased demand. To be fair IRIS “took this on the chin” and said they would look at this to make sure the service was good enough.

Shortly after the briefing I was flicking through a BA in flight magazine and found a full page from IBM, reassuring the reader that the levels of security provided by cloud based hosting and this reminded me of the argument presented by Simon Hazlitt in his excellent book Running On Air. In this book some irony is applied to the idea that independent and professional suppliers of cloud hosting, using the latest infrastructure and industry standard security, will in some way be less secure than local employees. The point is well made and it is a fact that the majority of data loss is connected to local staff negligence or more malevolent activity against less modern less secure local processes and infrastructure.

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See also: Rob Smith presention on Cloud Computing