“I don’t want to care” is probably one of the main reasons end-users want to move to cloud services besides of course IT costs.
Over the last couple of decades IT more and more has become entangled within our daily lives. In our work, at home, in the streets; IT is everywhere. We are more depended on IT services then we think.
The thing is we don’t want is to care about IT. IT should be there like electricity, tap water or mailman dropping the “oldskool snailmail” in the mailbox. All examples of services that we take for granted and which we don’t think about. It’s delivered to us according to when we expect it, either being on-demand or on a pre-fined schedule. How these services are organized or how it works is something most end-users don’t care about.
Same goes for cloud services. End-users don’t want to care about IT, they just want to consume it. End-users in this context can be anybody, corparate or personal, as long as they use the cloud service. But the technology that lies behind of these cloud services is of no interest to them. If the technology isn’t important to the end-user, what is?
The things that end-users look for IT cloud services can be brought down to 3 points :
- Performance; Either being a local software program on their personal computer or a cloud service, it doesn’t matter as long as it performs to the expectation of the end-users.
- Availability; If you buy a service you want to use it whenever you need it. A big frustration is not being able to use that service at the moment you need it. A cloud app can have 99,9% uptime, but that 1 hour the cloud service was down at the moment that users needed it the most, will result in a negative experience with the end user.
- Security; Data is new oil in this information era. And personal data of end-users is on top of the data list. End-users want to be sure that whatever data is put into the cloud doesn’t leave the cloud without their permission. They want to have full control over their data.
So whenever thinking about cloud computing and what matters, take into account the end-user and the 3 points above which matters to them!