From Mistrust to Trust: Cloud services take positions to drive digitization
The term “revolution” has multiple meanings depending on the field in which it is used, though underlying all of them is a notion of “rapid and profound change in anything”. A transformation of this sort generates uncertainty and even rejection. If we think about the more recent technological revolutions – the emergence of the internet at the end of the 20th century, for one – it would seem unlikely that at any time this could have provoked reservations in citizens and enterprises. Still, nowadays none of those reservations persist and we have assimilated the internet into every area of our lives.
We are now facing a new, doubtless profound and certainly rapid change, since technology tends to impose added speed with every new proposal. The revolution we are immersed in is digital transformation. Companies are defining new services, products, processes… in a word, new ways of acting that assimilate the potentials of digitization to drive, in turn, the digital transformation of clients, for the purpose of improving competitiveness.
No one doubts the advantages entailed by digitization. However, the adoption and assimilation of new realities is never exempt from uncertainty. Let us, for instance, think of services based in the Cloud, an indispensable element in the digital transformation process. Perhaps it is the name itself that provokes a sensation of the ephemeral and ethereal; at the outset, it gave rise to a certain reticence in companies and organizations, afraid to allow their most valuable assets (data, information and know-how) to be hosted on servers located in external infrastructures.
These barriers are falling today. As has happened in the private sphere, where we have been surmounting initial precautions to win the enthusiasm of banking, travel and on-line shopping, the way cloud proposals are perceived has been undergoing a radical change. Precaution is giving way to trust and the Cloud has been acquiring the image of an attractive, safe and flexible solution that is competitive in terms of costs and that enables payment exclusively for those services used or consumed, infrastructure adaptation to company needs at any given time, and improvement in the number and quality of the services offered to customers.
One of the changes in mentality indispensable for digitization to reach cruising speed is already taking place. The benefits of Clouds are by far surpassing the mistrust that normally accompanies innovative proposals. The sensation of fear is being diluted imperceptibly, albeit progressively, and as unstoppably as snow melting in the sunlight.