Cloud Advantages - Staying Current on the Technology Stack

In an era where business agility is a priority, and employee and customer expectations are rising faster than ever due to the consumerization of IT, the ability of technology to support innovation is critical.  

Some times though, it's the little things that get in the way.  

For want of a Nail

At the recent Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit we spoke with several companies where legacy web apps, some custom and some packaged software, aren't compatible with newer browser versions, requiring the company as a whole to stay on Internet Explorer 6.x.  IE 6 was  first released in August 2001 - nearly 10 years ago.  It was cited by PC Magazine as what "might be the least secure software on the planet." 

Why are companies not upgrading to newer IE versions? The reasons we heard at the conference ranged from packaged apps where the installed version isn't compatible with IE versions beyond 6  and upgrades to the packaged app are too costly, to several cases where the IT team can't touch important custom apps due to the cost and risk.  

Aside from the security risks, this is a great example where the on-premise model fails in terms of keeping up with technology stack.  Not necessarily because there aren't new versions available, but because the cost of staying up to date is too high, was never appropriately budgeted, etc.  As Andy Kyte of Gartner noted in "A Framework for the Lifetime Total Cost of Ownership of an Application", the 1st  year costs for "volatile" applications, and certainly content management falls into this category, are only 2% of lifetime costs.  So 98% of the costs are after the first year!  

And of course in the meantime with consumerization rapidly taking hold, employees and customers moving rapidly to new devices including tablets such as iPad and Galaxy and smartphones like iPhone and Android.   Richer technologies like HTML 5 are quickly becoming standard ways to provide the experience they expect.  

Since the under the traditional delivery model the total cost of keeping up with browsers, not the most strategic technology, is too high, IT organizations and the businesses they support aren't in a position to innovate, to put content to work where customers and employees want to use it.

One of the great things about the cloud, in contrast, is that these kinds of technology stack issues are handled automatically - no fuss and no muss - and are part of the cost of the service.

Something to consider when you're evaluating the deployment model for your next content application.  Where will your technology stack by 5 to 10 years from now.