Viewpoints: Why is cloud consumption on the rise in so many different sectors?
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Brett Akker, co-founder, Streetcar
Where people might have viewed car ownership as a necessity a few years ago, it is now seen more as a luxury, particularly for those people who use a car on very rare occasions. In a city like London, that is the vast majority of people.
If you asked people four or five years ago what it costs them to own their car, they would probably have thought of fuel costs and that was about it. Today they are thinking of all the other costs associated with vehicle ownership – depreciation, road tax, parking permit and insurance. People will move towards car sharing where the service itself is as convenient as car ownership, but you do not have the other hassles and costs that go with it.
Miles Shipside, commercial director, Rightmove
The inherent and continuing UK model is to buy your property, but there is a sector of buyers that just will not be able to get the finance. While there is a drop-off in the number of people that have an urgency to buy, people would still like to do so when they can afford to – they are just accepting that it is further away.
From a sentiment point of view, people often hope that financial crises are going to be over quickly and mortgage availability will return. I suspect there is a dawning realisation that a change of government is not going to solve this.
Banking crises that we thought were over are not necessarily so. Over time, there has been an acceptance that this is the status quo, and it is going to be longer before people can get on the housing ladder.
Krister Nilsson, chief executive, Xcerion
The risk of data loss is increasing with devices becoming much more mobile, so cloud storage is a way of managing this risk.
The trend is away from using the cloud as a convenient way of moving files between computers to using it as a way of disconnecting physical storage from the files. It means that hardware can be replaced or added, but the data is always accessible.
