 Clap now, because you might note later. OK, thank you very much for inviting in front along tonight. I think I've got one of the most exciting and confusing topics of IT at the moment, that is the cloud. The cloud's one of those terms that gets bandied around a bit. A lot. A lot in marketing. A lot in the industry. Maybe a lot by your kids. The fact is, and we honestly believe this at in front, and it's certainly what we're seeing in the industry at the right from the enterprise level is that the cloud is, without a doubt, the most titanic change. I don't mean that sinking-wise, monumental shift. My most monumental change in the way IT will be provisioned since the advent of the internet. And the reason I say this is because what the cloud really is, is the second wave of the internet. The benefits of the internet are going to be realized possibly for the first time to their fullest extent. The first wave when internet first came about was quite a disruptive threat to many business models. When people started selling from the internet, it really changed the way in which business needed to be executed. From an ICT perspective, a provider perspective, it was fantastic. This was a great opportunity for us to do more implementations, different implementations. This second wave of the internet, which is the cloud, has really reversed that. From an ICT provider perspective, it's really disrupting the way in which traditional IT providers are now going to have to provide their service. But from a business perspective, suddenly the second wave is the opportunity for businesses to do things differently. And from my perspective, small to medium enterprise. And I take medium enterprise up to 1,000 people. I don't know what medium enterprise is, probably to find it, but I'm talking 2,000, 3,000 people. These enterprises, the smaller you are, the more likely it is that you can take advantage of the cloud. Larger organizations are struggling to move to this new agile model because of incumbent ICT processes, procedures, and people and culture. So let's have a look a little bit more at what the cloud is. This is the most important point I'll probably make tonight. The cloud is not a technology or product but an operating model. The cloud is fundamentally changing the way in which businesses are going to consume IT. In the past, you bought a server, perhaps put it in your server room. You got IT staff that came around and supported your business. That operating model is a dying model. And this is why it's threatening the ICT providers but is an opportunity for business. So let's have a look at the next slide here where I'll explain what that model looks like. Any cloud service and the cloud operating model has some common features. They may not have all these features and they may not have them all to their full extent. But it is a self-service consumption model. It's not a build model. You don't build the service, you choose to consume it and generally consume it at your own discretion. It's a pay-as-you-use model. It's either a subscription model where I subscribe to this for a period of time or I build directly for the amount that I use. It's flexible. In the past, if I built a server or bought a product, be it my office productivity or my finance product that I had inside, I was very much held to that product for the period of time that I had it till I thought that I got a return on investment. Under the new model, I can move between products and providers flexibly. It's device-independent. I consume this service no longer from just my PC but from many different devices. And last one is inherently because I have disconnected that application or this service from how it's consumed on the device, it is quite often but not always inherently mobile. I can get it from anywhere. So the classic example of this is if we didn't live in Australia and we had more choice than Foxtel, here we've got some streaming media. I could choose to self-service consume from Netflix. I sign up to Netflix. I didn't have to build anything. I didn't have to buy a DVD. I can pay either a subscription for the months in consumer or pay for the movie that I watched. I can choose then to change over to watch it on YouTube or on Hulu or somewhere else. It's device-independent. I can watch it on any device, my enabled TV, my desktop, and it's mobile. I can watch it anywhere. So this is why streaming media is truly a cloud service. So once we've got it in our heads that cloud is not a product but a way of consuming traditional services, then cloud starts to make a lot more sense when you start hearing it in the media or you start seeing it in the marketing. If it doesn't do this, and there are plenty of people who are getting traditional products and doing what we call cloud-washing them, then you should be able to identify the difference. So you're all using the cloud today or at least your kids are. Now, if we have a look over here on the left, these are all models of cloud that certainly my children, even at 10, are using some of them. But many people are familiar with iTunes, Facebook, a bit of a funny cartoon here about how quickly things are changing even in the office. And this is very much a conversation that we have had in our office between two of our senior staff. Within two years, the way in which we're consuming IT is changing that rapidly that even in the ICT industry, we're struggling to keep up with a new model and a new way of doing things. So I explained cloud today to our 15-year-old work experience kid today, and it was very, very interesting. He didn't see this as innovative at all. He only understood this as the model. And when I said, what about installing a piece of software? And he said, that's old-fashioned. So this is really changing quite rapidly. We're already using cloud services. But as I'll explain later, many of these services that we're consuming now have some of the challenges that are yet to be addressed within the cloud space. So what does cloud services look like? Well, there's really three big flavors. There's infrastructure as a service. You may hear, especially from people like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, VMware, you can buy, I've got my server that sits in my server room. I want a virtual server that sits out on the internet or off-site. And I can install software on it and manages it as if it was in my organization. Now, this service here is more than just providing a virtual machine. You can choose to protect it, back it up, recover it. You can do other things with it, but it's a reasonably unsophisticated cloud offering. The other offering, in one that you may all be already familiar with, is platform as a service. The most common platform that small to medium enterprises are like to have seen so far are web services. If you have a company that are hosting your website and your web environment, that is a classic platform as a service. And people who have used that really get to understand the advantage of not having to run the servers, not having to keep them up to date, but push that out as a service. But the really exciting space is the one on the far side here, software as a service. Already we know Google Apps and the apps still have thousands and thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of applications. But what we're finding now are traditional desktop suppliers of service. Adobe, Microsoft, Myob, you name it. These are companies that small to medium enterprise will be very familiar with, are now starting to transform and offer their traditional desktop services as a cloud service. Consume, subscribe, flexible access from anywhere. And in fact, people like Adobe are starting to deemphasize the desktop product. And this is something that we all need to be aware of. If you've got a application in your environment that's critical to your business, and that vendor does not have a very clear plan to move that product to a cloud service, I would ask that you seriously look at alternatives for that product. Because this model over here at the moment is an option. Moving to software as a service and a subscription model is an option. I wouldn't say that within the next two years that this becomes the only way for many products that you're going to be able to consume their service. It's an exciting service, it's a fantastic service, and it's going to give you a lot of choice, but you really need to be prepared for it. So why would you go cloud? Let's look at the real business benefits, pay for use. I've been in the IT industry about 18 years, and I couldn't tell you how many times people go, well, I better buy 20 licenses for this in case I get more staff on, and if staff leave, I'm stuck with that asset. Or I need to buy, we now have an opportunity to scale up and scale down the licensing based on your per use requirement. Reduce capital and operational expenditure. I no longer need to bring in those IT staff to look after that server that I hope to God is being backed up with my critical business data. Both of those top two advantages bring the third, which is predictable IT spend. When you are buying on a subscription, you are better able to plan as you grow and shrink within your organization to understand what your IT spend will be. Self service, depending on the size of your organization and your reactive nature of your ICT staff, you don't know how long it's going to take when you want an application for someone to provide it to you. Here's an opportunity in a controlled manner within correctly deployed cloud to control the way in which your own staff can just ask for services that you've allowed them to get. And the last one is agile software and service offerings. Hundreds of thousands of applications that you can move between best of breed. Now, that actual process is something that is evolving in the cloud industry, moving between services, and we'll talk a little bit later about vendor lock-in, but all those advantages of a cloud service operating model give you more agility than businesses have ever had before to meet changing business requirements without having to bet against the future or react slowly when things change. So, should you go to the cloud or shouldn't you? There's a lot of great benefits to the cloud, but it's important that you proceed carefully. What I tell you about cloud today may be different at the end of the week. Vendors are fighting it out in a battle right now, bringing more and more services and enriching their services so rapidly, it's very hard to keep up and you need to be constantly watching what's happening. So before moving to the cloud, and this is critical, which cloud services are right for my business? And the only way you will ever understand that is if you understand how your business uses IT. I've seen plenty of organizations run into the cloud, thinking it's a great idea, getting caught up with it without understanding what their business really needs from the cloud and how does that align to existing services. Once I find a cloud service that seems to match what my business needs, I need to understand what the real cost benefits are. Amazon, for example, wonderful company, massive company, they've got many, many processes to ingest your data into their organization and not too many to leave. And then when you, similar to a mobile phone plan, you can get a bit of bill shock. So understanding how your business is going to use that and the real cost benefits is critical. Once you've decided that this particular service or all my services need to go to the cloud, one of the things that cloud providers particularly do badly is help you get there. I say, thanks for the credit card and they start billing you monthly. Well, how do I get all my data up there? Or how do I start to use this system? Thanks for the credit card and this is an unfortunate era we are in cloud, but it's getting better. And how will I manage it? Once you've got some of your services or all your services up in the cloud, it is a changed operating model. And so traditional IT support teams and also traditional ways in which you view your IT have changed. So understanding how that works. Three more minutes. Okay, geez, I better speed along. Okay. So this is a sort of assessment that you might do against one of your services. Let's say it's a finance system that I have inside. Same old considerations, different challenges. You should be asking yourself many of these same questions about any service that's critical to your business. Data loss and protection. If it's gonna be up on the cloud, I need to make sure that my entire business value which might be in my data for my users is gonna be maintained. Security or authentication. I certainly don't wanna log on to 20 different systems. I log on to this for HR and I log on to this for backup and I log on to this to get my file. Single sign on is very important and a very big challenge within cloud. Service level agreements. I wanna make sure that this is critical to my business that these people are gonna keep this system going. How does it integrate with my existing desktop products? Connectivity in cloud is king. But because you're mobile, if my business connection goes down, I can be at home, I can be at work, everyone. I don't bother coming in today, internet's down, building's burnt. Just all work from home. Your business continuity plan becomes both enriched and threatened by a cloud offering. It's not a problem. This is all about understanding what your plan is. Provider lock-in. Hotel California. You can check out any time you want but you can never leave. There are plenty of cloud providers that are a little bit like that. And the last one is the changing ICT management landscape which I mentioned. So, don't make that your cloud strategy. Do not have someone ring you up or do not sign up to something that you do not understand in cloud and certainly don't move your data up there. Go in with your eyes open because you'll get a monthly bill. And it's just like my kids on a mobile phone. Bill shock can happen. But cloud is so powerful and in fact it's the only way of the future. And it's small to medium enterprise. The smaller you are, the more likely it is that one or two providers like Office 365, great proponent of it. If you've got Microsoft in your organization and you've got a real license, do not go with anything other than the 365 because you can stay on your traditional model until you're ready to move. But make sure you go in with your eyes open. So, three bits of advice I'd provide. Get independent advice. One thing that we like about in front is we don't sell any cloud services at all. So we've got no vested interests but I can guarantee any cloud provider that comes to you where you haven't got that independent advice first is gonna think that you're all good match for everything that they sell. Second, assess your services to the cloud. Understand what you need and really understand those points I pointed out. The cost benefits for each service. And the last one, and this is critical. Engage IT support that understands cloud. If you've got a traditional IT support company that doesn't get this story, then their vested interest is keeping you exactly where you are. Because remember what I said right at the beginning. This is a threat to ICT. It's a threat to every business. You know what I'm saying? And so unless they're gonna evolve, with you, you're gonna have some problems. Look, cloud's a massive topic, lots to cover. I know I've lasted through that but hopefully now you've got a better idea of what cloud really is. It's a consumption model. That's a great opportunity for small to medium enterprise. The best opportunity for small to medium enterprise. And I think many, many organizations within the next two years will almost purely be working on cloud. So hopefully that was helpful. Thank you very much.