While industry is clearly moving to the cloud, the question about choosing right cloud model is getting more important. In my view, this is kind of thing you cannot ignore any more – I expect every manufacturing company is facing a challenging decision about how to improve their collaboration by bringing new innovative cloud tools and, at the same time, answer on privacy concerns, policies and regulations.
CMSWire article Hybrid Clouds for SharePoint: Great, but Not for Everyone published some interesting perspective on the topic of public and private clouds. Article speaks about the rise of Hybrid Cloud. Here is an interesting passage:
A hybrid model allows the enterprise to still keep their private information on premises, but at the same time provide employees with tools that support the new way of working — with “anytime, anywhere access.” So an enterprise might use Office 365 and SkyDrive Pro (now OneDrive for Business) to support collaboration and team projects, but still manage major systems through a private cloud.
I found referencing Microsoft and SharePoint as a good example to serve manufacturing companies – all of them are using SharePoint (to some degree) and almost all of them using SharePoint asked in the past about how to position SharePoint and PDM/PLM tools. Article is referencing pharmaceutical companies as an example of industry that can find difficult moving everything to public cloud. I’m sure, PLM vendors can find many other examples where regulation and policies will welcome hybrid cloud models.
However, as author stated Hybrid cloud can be costly and it won’t be “for everyone”. To maintain IT infrastructure for both on-premise and cloud based environment won’t work for small and medium sized companies. So, hybrid cloud can be a bridge model for many of these companies towards full public cloud deployments.
What is my conclusion? For manufacturing companies it will be all about cost vs. privacy. Many small to medium sized companies can find themselves very comfortable with public cloud solutions. However, those are under regulation and security concerns, will follow hybrid, private cloud route. For PLM vendors it is all about growth and market. Look on your market segment, customers and demands. To support Hybrid cloud PLM require resources. However, as a vendor, you can certainly limit your market growth by not supporting your large customers with hybrid cloud solutions. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
