Cloud Collaboration for Business Needs: Advantages, Challenges

By David Roe (@druadh20) Jan 19, 2012

At a technology level, there seems little to stop widely dispersed workers from collaborating in real time on many projects. But there are problems. According to a recent white paper from the Sand Hill Group and Citrix, the key to collaborative work is communications skills and supportive tools.

While technology can do little to improve communication skills, it is the core technology that enables dispersed teams to operate, without which the whole concept of business collaboration and social business is just a lot of hot air. But many enterprises are not sure what tools they should be using.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the most effective collaboration tools are currently in the cloud, which has enabled small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to lead the charge on this, but it is a move that is being followed in large enterprises, particularly at departmental level.

Cloud Collaboration Is Catching

Current cloud-based applications that enable collaboration include things such as high-definition video built around high-bandwidth Internet networks, while most applications at this point are accessible almost anywhere through mobile devices, and are nearly instantaneously scalable.

The white paper, entitled Business Collaboration in the Cloud, argues that a perfect storm is forming to push cloud computing forward. There are three elements to this:

Technologies such as virtualization, open-source, massive-scale automation, and multi-tenancy have enabled mass adoption.
Positive experiences of the cloud have far outnumbered negative experiences and stories around this are filtering across the marketplace.
The recession is pushing many CIOs to look for other ways to save money.

A study by the Sand Hill Group across 511 technology decision makers — the findings of which were published in their Leaders in the Cloud report — showed that already, at that stage, 60% of participants had implemented cloud solutions, with a notable portion of SMBs running over 80% of their business from the cloud.

Cloud Collaboration Challenges

If it were that easy, then why isn’t everyone going there? The answer is also simple: There are a number of challenges, which Citrix and Sand Hill have broken down into three elements:

1. Poor Meeting Management and Collaboration

Distributed environments need some investment. It is often the case that, to get a collaborative environment running, it needs support from a number of different departments around the enterprise.

Common communication tools such as email, telephone and instant messaging only go so far and they don’t provide the rich communication medium required by people to work collaboratively on presentations, documents or designs.

The cost behind complex collaboration products and low employee adoption, according to the paper, has put many firms off investing.

Lacking effective solutions, companies just throw the towel in and pay for their employees to travel.

2. Lost Productivity Due to Downtime

IT teams in distributed environments are obliged to provide support to all employees distributed across the globe. The paper argues that it can take up to 45 minutes with a technician to regulate even the simplest problem when the worker is remote.

When the technicians are unable to get physical access to the machine in question, it can take an average of 40% to 50% longer. Moreover, remote workers have a wide collection of routers and firewalls that require more work to troubleshoot. This challenge has a ripple effect on productivity: