The "cloud's" silver lining

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It's pretty tough out there, no matter where "there" is.  We all hope that things will get better soon in our world economy.

But one of the subtle points about this recession is that companies and government organizations are scrubbing their budgets to see how they can "do more with less."  Many cash- and resource-strapped organizations are turning toward software-as-a-service (or "cloud computing")-based approaches to help during this economic downturn.

Analyst David Ferris points this out in his blog entry today:

Struggling economies bring challenges, but also opportunities.

The IT world is ripe for a major shift, for three reasons:

* Economic concerns are driving IT departments to aggressively increase efficiency and reduce cost.
* Vendors have built vast SaaS infrastructures to enable outsourced messaging, collaboration, applications, and compliance solutions at a fixed cost (examples: Microsoft, Google, IBM, Amazon, Iron Mountain, LiveOffice).
* Server virtualization technologies - from Microsoft, Sun, VMWare, and in Linux distributions - have matured to the point where highly available, high-volume, and complex applications can be efficiently virtualized, at a savings of cost, space, administrative overhead, and energy consumption.

The state of the economy will have a catalytic effect on customer adoption of and migration to SaaS and virtual environments over the coming two years. Within the next three to five years, hosters will start using a combination of multitenancy and virtualization, to offer an always-on, always-available set of solutions to customers over the Internet.

Thus the state of the economy will greatly encourage customers to migrate to SaaS/cloud and virtual environments.

My colleague Amy Dugdale in our marketing team mentioned this out in a catchy way recently by saying Less Cash = More SaaS.

In addition, we previously discussed that email archiving demand will grow in the coming years as we all demand more transparency into what's happening in the business and government world.

Finally, we recently announced our Troubled Archive Relief Program(TARP) to help customers move from an on-premise archiving system today to LiveOffice's hosted email archive.

Often times of economic change catalyze shifts in technology and I think we're going through a major shift as we speak.