Repost, from SmartBrief: Cloud Adoption

SmartPulse

Does your company continually embrace new cloud technologies?

No	54.55%
Yes	45.45%

#Wonderware and #Microsoft have been working together for over 3 years developing cloud-based solutions for productivity and operations. Yet this poll reflects what others are saying--that industry is not yet ready for the cloud. 

Why is that?  I think a number of factors are at play:

• The applications are too specific.  The cloud needs to take an entire factory's applications, and virtualize them.  Mix and match may be too difficult to maintain.
• The applications that are cloud-based may not solve the difficult problems.  Reporting is simple in the cloud, but reporting can be done in a variety of ways, and it may not be enough to go through the IT hurdles to get a cloud solution adopted.
• Education.  It still may not be apparent that either cloud solutions are available, or that they are relevant to a particular function, like plant-wide reporting.
• Security.  Companies are still reeling from security breaches such as StuxNet. Their IP is their lifeblood, and they aren't exposing it if solutions are available that do not have the same perceived risk.

On the other hand, the cloud is a tremendous boon to those companies that may not have the infrastructure, nor talent, to build and maintain applications such as plant reporting, plant data collection, plant intelligence. 

So it is up to us as an industry to continue to break down these barriers to adoption.  Education, success stories, finding the right markets--they all contribute to the proliferation of a solution that really helps industry scale, cost effectively, and easily adopt new technologies.