It’s hard for businesses to adapt to a world where technology is moving at the rapid pace that it has been for the few months – that much is apparent if you walk into any one of the numerous business offices that are still running Windows XP. This doesn’t mean, however, that businesses are all eternally resistant to change. A recent study done by Janet Kennedy, president of Microsoft Canada, shows off some statistics that paint a brighter picture – at the very least, a brighter picture for Canadian business.
The study shows that 52% of Canadian businesses surveyed are looking to start utilizing cloud computing in their business. This is a massive change from the results collected only a year ago, where 90% of those surveyed said that they didn’t even really know what cloud computing was. That’s a massive change in opinion over just a year, and it’s the sort of change that’s going to be necessary if businesses are going to revolutionize the way that they operate by plugging their information into the cloud.
The biggest concern for those on the fence seems to be security – something that 52% of those surveyed said they are only spending 20% of what they should be spending on it. At the end of the day, this dissatisfaction became a common thread among the 700 executives that were questioned. Only 15% of these 700 people rated their companies at a 9/10 or above in their utilization of technology.
Hopefully, with these executives understanding that they’re falling behind in technology and simultaneously becoming more receptive to the idea of cloud computing, we could see a widespread acceptance of the cloud spiking productivity in significant ways, and even promoting more responsible spending on security.
There’s still a long way to go before businesses truly embrace the technology that’s quickly becoming available to them – three quarters of those surveyed still considered Microsoft’s Internet of Things to be a confusing concept. Half of those surveyed had never even heard of the IoT before.
“With tens of billions of new connected devices set to join the internet of things in the near future, the potential for innovative new business opportunities is staggering, so it’s kind of a shock that the level of understanding of the size of this coming wave of new technology is so low,” said digital technology expert Amber MacArthur.
With this long road of technological comprehension still yet to be paved, it’s easy to think that the relationship between technology and the business it’s made for is stagnating. However, at least the rapid shift in view of cloud computing gives us some hope for the future.
