If you are going to invest in cloud technology, John Tate has some words of advice – take time first to research it thoroughly.

Last month I chaired a breakfast round table looking at the cloud, with a group of senior finance professionals working in civil society. Hosted by a charity called Eduserv, which I joined as a trustee earlier this year, we explored the opportunities and issues with cloud adoption.

The feeling from attendees was that in the medium to long-term the cloud will become the standard way that IT is used in the sector. However, there are a lot of issues to tackle to ensure that any expenditure on this technology generates a real return on investment.

Adoption of the cloud

This event came hot on the heels of a piece of research Eduserv had published looking at the current state of cloud adoption in the government sector.

This was based on survey responses and interviews involving over 800 senior civil servants and chief information officers – a very strong sample base.

Early last year, the government announced a big push to speed up public sector cloud adoption, mandating that Whitehall departments should implement a ‘public cloud first’ policy, and that they should consider public cloud services as the main channel of their IT spending.

Eduserv found that, despite the government’s push to encourage the public sector to adopt cloud technology, only 20 per cent of those surveyed had implemented software in the cloud in their organisations. Of those, 83 per cent said their experience of cloud IT was poor and 40 per cent described problems with accessing data. Some may argue that these findings are not particularly relevant to charities.

I agree that many public sector organisations are a lot bigger than any charity, and they do have a reputation for managing IT projects poorly. However, my own experience with charities suggests they have a lot in common with these findings – so I believe we have much to learn from this unbiased survey.

The research went on to look at some of the reasons for the low adoption levels of the cloud and the disappointing levels of satisfaction. A key issue was an ongoing lack of investment in knowledge and skills.

Some 75 per cent of IT professionals surveyed said that business stakeholders in the public sector didn’t understand the benefits of the cloud, and 88 per cent said there was a lack of training about the cloud in their organisation. Fewer than half of the organisations felt that they had the skills to implement or manage a cloud environment.

Bearing in mind that a typical public sector body will have a much larger IT department than most charities, the lack of skills in the not-for-profit sector is likely to be greater.

The IT industry is investing billions of dollars in trying to convince us to adopt cloud solutions and many suppliers are suggesting that the process is straightforward.

Based on this survey I would highlight the need for caution. If you are going to invest in this area, take time to research and learn what it is all about.

Don’t forget IT security

Finally, don’t forget IT security when considering a cloud solution. I have been banging on about this for ages. If you still need any convincing that this is an issue, you need look no further than last month which was packed with news stories of security breaches.

For example, The Sunday Times gained access to millions of emails and other documents relating to alleged payments made in connection with the 2022 football World Cup being awarded to Qatar.

In another case, Twitter was forced to shut down its popular TweetDeck application for several hours following a major security alert when users of one version of the app reported getting random messages that allowed attackers to place computer code in a tweet.

And, as a third example, the OpenSSL Foundation announced it was patching six newly-discovered vulnerabilities in the same software that Heartbleed had lived in.

Unfortunately many organisations do not take the risk of security breaches sufficiently seriously, and only take action when it is too late.

John Tate is a business consultant, IT adviser to CFG and a visiting lecturer at Cass Business School.