Informatica Perspectives

A blog at IT-Director.com caught my eye yesterday.  Entitled "IT Budgets, Clouds and Virtualization" it included the following comment:

“For Cloud computing, chief amongst these concerns is the readiness of commercial organisations to trust significant proportions of their essential, and hence incredibly valuable, corporate information to platforms and suppliers over whom they have little control and who might hold the data wherever they wish. Such a leap of faith is today beyond consideration in many business scenarios.”

This is spot-on.  There is so much talk about "cloud computing this, and cloud computing that".  When it comes to corporations there are many examples of outsourcing non-core business processes to the cloud.  Here at Informatica we use over 17 different services ourselves. I'd say the most mission-critical of these is our email marketing system (can't tell you who or I'd have to shoot you!).  We're rolling it out worldwide across our marketing team and have spent the last few months integrating it with our own on-premise CRM system, contact hub and datawarehouse.  Not a trivial task but incredibly important for me (well, I'm a marketeer) but probably less mission-critical to our CFO!

At the end of the day corporations WILL move data into the clouds so whilst I agree with Tony in the above-mentioned article, I also disagree with him (OK, bit of a split personality here now).  I agree that it is foolish to simply “go to the clouds”, but I disagree about the state of the industry.  It is possible to keep the data secure and we, amongst others, have proven that with our on-demand integration service.  It is also possible to integrate such services into core business processes.  My statement would be - don't overlook the integration. You do it at your peril.  We've had a LOT of experience of helping companies do this effectively - after all we're the data integration company!

Oh … and we can do it from in the clouds too