Of course you'd say, well that would be insane for anyone to not take advantage of the benefits. But I suspect that education and awareness has a lot to do with the indecision and/or inactivity of not going to the cloud. Not all agencies can be that tech savvy. And, there is still a slight stigma of security when it comes to the cloud. Regardless of infrastructure (and I use Microsoft Azure as an example) for triple-redundancy for high availability and security, no one can guarantee fault-free operations.
So let's look at manufacturing cloud adoption. A survey by LNS Research, as published in Manufacturing.net last October, showed a slight bump in the anticipated use of the cloud for plant software--around 17% of the respondents intended to use (or consider). I'd still say this is a small percentage, but it's progress. The benefits and cost savings for ERP using a cloud SaaS, as defined by Hudson IT, show over $2M in savings over 3 years--extrapolate that to Industrial automation users, and you could still see over a $1M savings (assuming that large, complex industrial automation projects run 50% of the cost of an ERP).
Wonderware has been working with Microsoft for well over three years now to bring solutions and knowledge of the cloud to industry. What have we found? Well, the cloud is the delivery mechanism--but what customers really want is to make reporting and analysis easier, more accessible, and cheaper. That's what the cloud does. Maybe we need to call it "hosted" or "hands off reporting" in order to remove the stigma of what the cloud is perceived to be. In reality, it's a productivity tool that provides users with unrestricted use of solutions to help them manage and execute their operations. Applications such as #SmartGlance and #Historian Online bring mobile reporting and analysis. Do you think we should just drop the word "cloud?" Let me know.
maryanne.steidinger@schneider-electric.com.
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