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Dawn: Once again if you are just joining us,
this is Cloud Computing: Benefits and Barriers for Nonprofits and Libraries.
I'd like to introduce you to today's presenters. My name is Dawn Krause. I am your facilitator,
as I've already mentioned. We have three wonderful presenters today.
The first is Patrick Callihan. He is Executive Director for NPower Pennsylvania,
a nonprofit whose mission is to ensure that all nonprofits use technology effectively
to better serve their communities. His background includes over 25 years of operations management
and college leadership. And during his tenure at NPower PA, Patrick has grown the organization
by increasing services and adding programs that directly impact the community.
And he will shortly introduce us to his organization.
Anna Jaeger is Director of Microsoft Program and Special Projects.
She's also the cofounder of the Green Tech initiative here at TechSoup Global.
Green Tech's mission is to help nonprofits and libraries reduce their environmental impact
through the effective use of technology, including cloud technologies.
Prior to her work on the cloud survey, Ms. Jaeger lead TechSoup's IT applications department
which implemented and maintained all of the enterprise software and websites.
Last but not least, I'm sorry, Kevin, I do apologize for not having your picture here.
But Kevin Lo is Lead Technology Analyst at TechSoup Global
where he is responsible for content development and product evaluation.
He's contributed to guides for basic technology for nonprofits such as Tech Beginners Guide
and the Disaster Planning Toolkit, two very helpful resources on TechSoup.org's website.
Since his first Unix Freenet account at his local library,
he is extremely interested in grid and cloud computing.
Welcome presenters. And also in the background assisting with chat today
is Ariel Gilbert-Knight. Thank you.
Our first presenter, I think, Anna, you're going to go over the goals.
Anna: Sure, but why don't we first give Pat a chance to introduce his organization quickly?
Dawn: Great.
Pat: Yeah, thanks, Anna. This is Patrick Callihan. I'm with NPower Pennsylvania.
We also operate a brand that you may be familiar with or may have heard through TechSoup
called NPCloud which stands for nonprofit cloud. And our work with TechSoup, and with nonprofits,
we're a nonprofit organization and our mission is really to help other organizations
make the best use of technology to further their missions.
So we do that through a lot of different ways but not the least of which is taking advantage
of some of the cloud computing alternatives that are out there today. So, thank you.
Anna: Thanks, Pat. Hi, everyone. This is Anna, and I wanted to go over the goals of today's webinar.
The first thing is I want you to have a general understanding of what organizations
around the world have said about the advantages, barriers and motivators for using cloud computing.
We hope that these will also apply to you and that you can learn some lessons
about what your peers are doing, and how they apply to you.
To get a little more specific instead of just throwing a bunch of data at you,
we do want to familiarize you with the types of applications and the specific applications
nonprofits are using. So are they using collaboration and Skype as an example.
And then we also want to throw in some tips for integrating cloud solutions
into your organization's tech plan.
I just want to do a quick check here. I saw in the chat that somebody said
that the audio was having an issue. Are folks still having an issue with hearing my voice?
If you are, please just let us know in the chat window.
Hmm. Okay. Thank you.
So I saw that you can hear but it's not a great connection.
I'll try to slow down a little bit and see if that helps.
Dawn, is there anything we can do to ask Tina for some help on this?
Dawn: Yes, I'm trying to get her now.
Tina: I'm standing by. Can I have you speak for a moment, please?
Anna: Sure, I'm happy to speak and let you know. We're planning today,
we don't have so much an agenda point, bullet points that we want to go through,
but we hope to have more of a conversation so that we will show you the data that we received,
and then talk a little bit more. Pat and Kevin can talk from some real-world experience.
Okay. So I'm just going to keep going. I'm seeing that folks are saying it's much better now,
so that's great. Somebody suggested that folks dial in by phone,
that maybe it's a little better than the streaming.
First we wanted to do a quick poll to get a sense of who's on the phone.
So if you would, just go ahead and take that poll and let us know.
Dawn: It looks like the results are coming in, Anna. I'm not sure if you're seeing all that
on the right-hand side there, but lots of people answering.
Anna: Great. And we saw in your registrations that a lot of folks,
there were a number of relative novices to cloud. So we won't be delving into deep technical detail
on this. Although I am seeing that the majority of folks on the call
are identifying as IT decision-makers. So that's an interesting mix.
And so while we'll be mentioning some of the applications that folks told us about in the survey,
we won't be making specific recommendations on this call about which ones are right
for your organizations, but we will talk to you about tech planning.
So I just want to set those expectations right up front.
Alright. So yeah, it looks like we've got about 46 IT decision-makers.
Some 36 have some responsibility for IT, 12 who are formal IT staff,
and about 17 who have no formal role. Great. It's always helpful to understand who our audience is.
So we'll start here. Pat will give us a quick introduction and definition
of types of cloud services.
Pat: Thanks, Anna. I think as we get into talking about cloud computing and some of the results
that came out of this survey, it's good to do a quick level set about what exactly we're discussing.
And generally speaking, when defining the cloud, it's really any service that is delivered
over the Internet but it really gets packaged into three different services.
And probably the one that everyone is mot familiar with is software as a service.
And these are the user packages like Office 365. It could also be Google Apps
as well as things like Facebook. So it's generally software that you're using over the Internet
without actually downloading anything onto your computer.
The other you'll hear sometimes talked about is platform as a service,
and this is applicable mostly to developers. So generally speaking
they're using cloud-based software to develop other software or applications
without actually having to have a server on-site, and running their tests on-site.
So without a large investment in capital they are able to develop applications in the cloud.
And then finally infrastructure as a service. If you haven't heard of this category,
I think you'll start to hear more of this because this starts to replace some of the traditional hardware
inside your offices. So things like servers that are probably in a back closet or in a server room
somewhere are now being replaced with infrastructure as a service
where hosted servers or you may even hear them referred to as VMs or virtual machines.
As well as another area that's starting to grow is infrastructure as a service, hosted desktops.
So these are your desktop images as you would have it on your laptop or desktop PC.
However, it's really hosted in a computer within a data center, and accessed over the Internet,
again. And some of the advantages of that are, you know, not having to replace your machine
quite as often, not having to have as powerful a machine. So may have heard of like thin clients
or zero clients, and those typically can access desktop as a service.
So any basically, it's any of the hardware infrastructure that's no longer on site
is now hosted in the cloud. But for purposes of this conversation today,
and we'll define that in a minute because I think that it's important you see
what was used for the survey, we're primarily discussing software as a service.
Anna: Yes, indeed we are. Thank you, Pat. For the most part we were focusing
on software as a service in the survey, but we did include some other options,
more infrastructure-based options in some of the lists that we chose to offer.
Also, the report that we will just be touching on a few data points from the report,
but the full report is available free to anyone online.
And there's a link to that at the end of this presentation should you want to go
and check it out. We also have translated the executive summary of that report
into 19 languages. And those are also available free online for folks who want it.
So here on your screen you can see the definitions that we used,
but it allows you to access software via the Internet instead of from your hard drive
or your local computer network. So we were trying to make a very simple definition for everyone
around the world, because we did translate this study, or this survey into 21 languages,
and worked with our partner network around the world to do outreach in many of those countries.
As you can see here in this slide we did get responses from people in 88 countries.
And we got over 10,593 useable responses. And you can see on the map
the areas that are shaded. The ones in blue received over 100 responses per country,
and that was our threshold for doing individual country analysis.
Below, you can see, below the map, you can see two pie charts which break out by country
on the left, or region actually, United States, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
And you can see that the United States and Western Europe and Canada
make up the largest percentage of respondents. In the pie chart on the right,
we broke the results down by GDP of that country. So we grouped countries into tiers.
The lowest was below $10,000 GDP. And then the highest grouping was above $20,000 GDP.
So as you can see, some of the richest countries in the world
made up the majority of the respondents.
In addition to the full report and those executive summaries translated into 19 languages,
we also do have 25 country-level reports. So for every country that's in blue,
we do have an individual report about what the respondents in that country reported in the survey.
So some of those that you can see, obviously the U.S. and Canada, South Africa, Egypt, India,
Australia, New Zealand, and a number of countries in Western Europe
and Central and Eastern Europe.
So we also saw in the registrations that you guys were interested in the respondent profile
by organization size. We're hoping that you can figure out where in this chart you belong.
And I'll mention as we go along the way, how some of the results differentiated by organization size.
I see that there's a quick question. Were there any from South America?
Unfortunately, no. That region, as you can see, is not in blue. We did get 127 responses
from Mexico, but we were unable to get sufficient responses from any of the other countries
in South America.
Okay, moving on. So we had to pick one way to define organizations by size
and we didn't feel it was appropriate to use budget, because of the exchange issues
doing currency exchange. So the way we chose to break it down was by number of fulltime staff,
and we included in that fulltime staff fulltime volunteers as well.
So if you had a fulltime executive director volunteer, they would count as fulltime staff.
So small was zero to nine; medium, ten to 44; and large is over 44, over 44 or 45+.
And you can see that the largest percentage of the sample
was in the small organization category of 64%.
Now let's do Poll 2. So we are interested to know a little bit more about you guys
and how you utilize the web, or your organization utilizes the web. Do you not use it at all?
Do you use it in a light way, just to do some email or social media? Or are you a heavy user?
Do you use collaboration tools, CRM, grants management, donor management?
Let's see what we've got going here. We'll give you just a moment to fill that out.
[Silence]
Anna: Great. So it looks like the majority of you guys are light cloud users,
but there is a healthy number of you who consider yourselves non-cloud users.
We've got 19 so far, and then about 29 of you who are heavy cloud users. That's an interesting mix.
I see some folks saying that they should've checked "light" instead of "non,"
so maybe a few more in the light category.
Great.
So now we'll move on to some of the key findings. So as you can see from the poll results,
we've got 112 folks, and only 20, or fewer than 20 say that they don't use the cloud at all.
That corresponds pretty closely with some of our key findings,
and some findings from other organizations like NTen.
NTen is another nonprofit technology group. And they also have published a report
that is definitely worth looking at if you're not familiar with it.
We have a link to that in the resource list that we will be sending out after the webinar via email.
So I want to give you a word of caution or a little caveat here.
Our results, we do expect to skew towards those organizations who are connected, who are online,
and do use some sort of cloud tools already, because they were taking this survey online.
So they had to be connected, by definition. So do understand that these results represent
those organizations who are already connected. Although, we did have feedback
from some of our partners in India and Egypt where they had to get some nonprofits into a lab
so that they would have a stable Internet connection to be able to take the survey.
And they said just because they had Internet access didn't mean that they had it all day long,
that they might just have it for two to four hours a day. So cloud technologies were harder for them.
But as I mentioned, about 74% of the respondents were from the higher GDP countries,
and a lot from the U.S. So we also believe that the data skews somewhat towards U.S.
and Canadian and Western European organizations.
So these are our key findings. 90% of respondents indicated using cloud computing solutions.
Although, it was interesting because we asked the question in a couple of different ways
and found that people did not always respond that they did use cloud computing.
But when we asked them about specific applications in further questions,
they did say that they used those applications. And these are the folks who don't realize
that they're using the cloud, and we're still trying to educate around that issue.
79% said the greatest advantage is easier software and hardware administration.
And 60% said lack of knowledge is the greatest barrier to adoption.
We were really surprised or I personally was really surprised that cost was not the greatest barrier
to adoption, but lack of knowledge. And that ties back to what I was saying earlier
where people don't realize that they were using cloud technologies when they are.
Another interesting point was that 53% reported that they had plans to move a significant portion,
and we left the definition of significant portion up to the respondent, but that they're planning to move
a significant portion of their IT to the cloud within three years.
And we'll dig into all of these in a little more detail in a moment.
But then 47% said that the greatest motivator were reducing cost and ease of setup.
So we also tried to break down our results into light and heavy usage.
And I think Kevin is going to jump in here with that.
Kevin: Thanks, Anna. I think for those of you who later realize they are probably light users
rather than non-users, probably see that they are actually using a lot of cloud services
that they're not really aware that they are cloud. So it sounds like the Facebook
that you use in the office or on your mobile, that exists in the cloud.
Any time that you use a log-on that you can use outside your office,
essentially it's probably a cloud service. So going back to the point about moving a significant portion
of their IT, I think that has to do with when we phrase the question,
it probably has to do with things that are not, that require significant resources or some resources
to get, say, your donor management to the cloud versus something that's already existing
in the cloud that you're using. So we think that the demographics in this survey reflect pretty well
what we think the general IT trend will be. That is, a lot of IT is going to be in the cloud.
That's being identified by both enterprises and small business.
And we think that we should provide the NGO sector these resources as well.
Anna: Great. Thanks so much. I see we had a couple of questions in the chat
and some hands raised. And I think the point on chat was a good one.
If you don't have knowledge to evaluate tech tools, you never get to the discussion of cost
being a limiting factor or a barrier. So that's an excellent point to make.
Okay. We'll move on and then. I think we'll be taking some of these questions
as we go through, but also we have some time scheduled at the end
to address some of these questions.
So here were some of the apps that respondents were familiar with.
Obviously the Facebook, Gmail, Skype, Twitter, a lot of folks were very familiar with.
But even down to Office Live, Salesorce and CRM, there were still over a third of the people
were familiar with these tools.
However, when we looked at actually usage, we saw that it lags behind the familiarity,
which makes sense. But still you can see up on the left-hand side here — I'm trying to get my pointer —
that still 70% say Facebook, 63% say Gmail, and 50% are using Skype in their organizations.
And one point of clarification, somebody asked, it sounds as if you use Internet,
you're using the cloud. Yes and no. We did not include normal Internet browsing
and searching and some of those, and reading content as choices in the survey.
So we were really focusing on applications that you interact with like Skype or email,
or Office productivity tools like Office 365 or Google Docs.
So we were trying to have a pretty broad definition, but not so broad that it would include everybody
who has a computer and an Internet connection, or phone with an Internet connection.
As Kevin said, it's a good rule of thumb, I think, if you're able to log into it outside of your office,
it's a pretty good bet that it's cloud technology.
So now we're getting into some of the actual results. 79% said that administration category
or answers were the greatest advantages. So some of those answers
were easier software access, easier disaster recovery, reduced system administration,
and rapid deployment.
If you're interested in the breakdown of some of these categories we did publish most of this data
in the appendix of our full report, so you can see exactly how many people answered something
as a major or a minor advantage, and how those break down for each of the bullet points below.
Also 62% did indicate that cost was a barrier, or was an advantage.
But as we'll see later, they also reported cost as a barrier. So one of the things that we learned
from this study and that we knew, was that this issue is complex and there's a lot of confusion
out there. Obviously cost and security are two of those where we saw a lot of opposing views
or answers that seemed to be in conflict.
So, Pat, I'm wondering if you wanna jump in here with an example of some of the advantages
you see in your work with with nonprofits?
Pat: Yes. Thank you, Anna. This is interesting data to me. And none of it frankly surprises me
too much. For one, when I look at the administration, I see 79% cited administration
as one of the reasons to use cloud-based solutions. I completely agree.
And it's one of the things we talk to our clients about.
You know, managing, owning, maintaining, replacing a server is very costly,
and most of us don't do it very well. We don't keep them up to date, or if we do keep them up to date,
we may be paying someone to keep them up to date, so very expensive to own and maintain.
So I think that's one of the huge upsides to cloud computing is that it can actually reduce
some of your hardware costs, and make your administration much easier.
So administration and costs somewhat go hand in hand.
I will say, you know, looking at costs, 62% say it's favorable and then you'll see a slide later
where there's a significant portion that don't feel that cost is a factor for the positive.
It's interesting to me too, because what we see is, a lot depends on size, right?
Most of the nonprofits we work with are you know, generally speaking, ten to maybe 50,
upwards sometimes of a couple hundred users. And there is definitely a price point
where it makes sense to be on the cloud, and where it may not make sense to be on the cloud,
depending on the application you're talking about.
So for instance, if you have a hundred users and they all need to be on Salesforce.com.
Well you know, SalesForce will donate ten licenses to nonprofits. So that's great,
but you're going to pay for the other 90 licenses that you need.
So it could be quite costly for your organization. But on the other hand,
if you're a smaller organization and ten people being inside your data base at any given time
is more than enough, then it's very attractive from a cost standpoint.
So I think one of the messages there is you really need to look at what kind of cloud applications
you're considering for your organization, and where the cost benefit line is drawn
based on the size of your organization, and what you're trying to do with that software.
Anna: Thanks, Pat. That's some great tips. And I wish we had something where we could say,
here, fill out this spreadsheet and that will tell you whether this is going to be cost-prohibitive or not,
for you, or if it's a wise investment for your organization. But unfortunately,
it really depends on the size and skill level in your organization,
and the particular solution you are looking at, or solutions that you're looking at.
Okay. So moving on. Oh, also, I saw a question in chat about asking why PayPal was so low in usage.
We have steered clear of speculating about the cause of these answers,
or why people answered this way. We're trying to just put the data out there and let others speculate
on it. It could be that PayPal is not used in the organization, but that people use it on their own.
And we did try to differentiate in the survey about the difference between what is used
in an organization and what people use personally.
So that could be one of the reasons why PayPal didn't receive a higher percentage of responses.
So now we're getting into some of the barriers, things that made it difficult for folks
to adopt cloud technologies. And we saw that 60% indicated that lack of knowledge
was the greatest barrier. And 30% of respondents said that they didn't even know enough
to know what the barriers are. So that definitely goes back to what somebody asked earlier
or stated earlier where if you don't know enough, you can't even get to cost as an issue
because you're not sure.
One of the ways that TechSoup Global and our associated network will be responding to this bit
of data is, we will be producing a content stream throughout the year,
trying to address some of the issues around lack of knowledge to help people make better choices
for their organization, mostly focused around the cloud, but also how do you integrate that
in your general tech planning. And Kevin actually will be writing, I think, Kevin and Ariel
will be writing a lot of that content. So we've got two of our greatest experts here.
But also cost is definitely a factor, and that's another thing that we are trying to address here
is partnering. As many of you know, we partner with corporations in the world
to get their product donated to, or discounted to nonprofits and libraries.
And we are continuing to pursue more donor partners, and hope to leverage some of this data
to say, hey, your products are needed out there by these nonprofits, but cost is a major barrier.
So help us with that. And so we're hoping to get more donated and discounted products
into the network and into the catalog.
Okay. Yes. There's a question in the chat about will we be providing links
to the individual country survey results. And we do have a list already up online
where you'll find our published survey about links to our partners' surveys.
And each of our partners has published their individual country reports.
And if there's something that you can't find there, please feel free to reach out to me directly,
and I can help get you the results that you're looking for.
Okay. Moving on.
Sorry, just flipping here.
So now we're looking at motivators. We asked folks not just what would be a barrier,
but what would motivate them to move to the cloud? What would help?
And here are the results that we found. Cost now was one of the greatest motivators
that we did see reported in the results, along with ease of setup
which goes back to the administration advantage that folks were reporting earlier in the survey.
And training here shows up at 37%, which is interesting because remember,
one of the greatest barriers was lack of knowledge. So 60% were reporting lack of knowledge
was an issue but only 37% — Oops, I'm messing up my slides here. —
but only 37% were showing that it was a motivator. That's an interesting conundrum for us.
How do we address our content and our offerings to best help motivate and get folks trained
and overcome that lack of knowledge. Pat, do you want to jump in here
with some of your real-world experiences?
Pat: Yeah, sure thing Anna. So when I look at that training number, I see another, I guess,
another viewpoint from that, and that's that one of the reasons folks are considering
adopting cloud technologies is the ability to train people and do remote consulting.
And I think this is an especially important concept because one of the things
that cloud really does is allow for a great deal of mobility. So because you're not physically tied
to your office any more, accessing your information remotely is much easier
if it's stored in the cloud.
And I think I saw one of the questions earlier about if the Internet connection goes down,
then the cloud goes down and I'm out of luck, right? Well, yes, that is true.
Now I would turn that around and say if your server goes down in your office and you know,
you're completely out of luck until you get that server up and running which could take —
I've seen it take hours, days. I've seen it take up to a week to get a new machine in there,
get everything migrated and loaded and get folks back to work.
Whereas if your Internet connection goes down, you can just leave the building
and go somewhere else, frankly, a Starbucks, and be right back onto your cloud applications
like email and documents and so forth. So there are advantages and disadvantages on both sides.
Certainly, again, cost is a factor, and there's good cost advantages and bad cost advantages.
It just depends on size and the applications you're looking at and how expensive they are,
because the one thing that's different is it's shifting a lot of your investment dollars
from capital expenses to operational expenses. So it's something you want to keep in mind.
And then you are paying a subscription fee generally, for cloud-based software,
so it's going to be an ongoing fee. But it certainly reduces your physical footprint,
the need to buy servers, the need to replace those servers frequently, and to maintain those servers.
I see ease of setup as being a motivator as well, and I think that's a terrific one.
one of the characteristics of being cloud computing is that it's on demand, right?
So that today I can go out onto the Internet and purchase a piece of software
and be using it literally within minutes, whereas if it were a client server-based software,
I would have to get my server administrator to load the software onto the server
and give permissions to me and move data on there and so forth,
and that can take days if not weeks. So from an ease of setup standpoint,
it's much faster generally to deploy cloud technologies
and much easier to use. So, I'll leave it at that.
Kevin: This is Kevin. Thanks Pat, for your explanations and experiences.
I do want to jump in and say that for many nonprofits who may not
have a server client system, it's kind of a moot point on the cost saving of administering a server
because for instance, you might have five on-site staff, a few volunteers who comes in now and then,
who may work from home sometimes. You may not even have a server to manage.
You may just be working on some grant reports. They can be shared online.
You may be having some budgets to your board members who are probably not there at all.
So I think it also depends on how your nonprofit is ran. If you don't have that existing infrastructure,
you may be moving to a cloud and not noticing it. So it depends really on how you plan
to run your office, and how that IT supplements those business processes.
So the 20% on not planning to use cloud services, they may already be using cloud services.
They're just not necessarily migrating existing data bases or the data bases
that are just on the get-go are in the cloud. I see increasingly the newer nonprofits
start with Salesforce or they start with something in the cloud like DonorPerfect
online for example. Then you don't really have that migration to go through.
You don't have an infrastructure to migrate.
Anna: Thanks, guys. That's some great conversation.
And again, that just illustrates some of the complexities.
And we know it's not a straightforward, do I go to the cloud or don't I?
Or do I adopt this technology or don't I?
There are lots of factors that you should be factoring in. In each of these categories
are things that you should factor in. Cost, what is the cost going to look like for you?
And what does your existing solution look like?
If you don't have a server but you've got volunteers out there and you need to communicate
with them in the field more effectively, well, maybe cost is less of a factor
because your need is so great.
Ease of setup and do you have IT resources and technical folks who can do in-house applications?
Or is something like a CRM so complex that you need to engage a consultant to help you?
Training, and I saw somebody ask a question about security. And that goes to some of the trust
and do you trust the vendor who you'll be working with?
And this actually segues into another question that someone had.
What's the likelihood that the cloud will go down? You know Pat, I also welcome you jumping in here.
But my take on it is everyone goes down, right? Everyone gets hit by hackers.
But again, if you don't have the technical resources to support your infrastructure,
and you don't have redundant backup of your servers elsewhere,
the likelihood that you could have a catastrophic failure is greater on an in-house server
if you don't have the right support system for that. It's more likely that your Internet connection
might go down and as Pat said before, then you can go home or go to your Starbucks
or another café and potentially get to some of your mission-critical data and applications.
Pat: Yeah, I'll just tag onto that a little bit there, Anna.
And you know, I think it's really important that we remember and understand that the cloud
isn't one thing. It's a lot of different things. And when folks are referring to cloud technologies,
they're still being hosted somewhere. So as Anna said, if they're not in your office,
they're in someone's data center. And it's not a single data center.
There're many data centers. So if you look at Amazon or Salesforce or Microsoft,
take Microsoft for instance. They have I believe it's somewhere
between seven and nine data centers worldwide now.
So yeah, some of those can go offline, and they will from time to time.
What's important is that they have some sort of redundant systems built in.
So in the case of Microsoft, they store your data in two different locations,
and those two locations are at least 1,000 miles apart from one another.
So their whole system is designed to withstand some disasters
and avert disaster by having redundancy built in.
And that's important because you want to know who's hosting your data
and where it's being hosted, because there are some folks who will say,
well, you can back up your data with us in our cloud.
And you come to realize that's a single place. It's only being backed up in one place.
And if that place goes offline or if there's some sort of disaster, your data is now gone.
So there are various tier levels of data centers, and in each tier comes more redundancy,
and more failsafe methodology that's in place to protect your data.
And so some of the big players like Microsoft and Salesforce and Amazon
are using the very highest level technologies. Smaller providers may not be.
So you always want to do your homework and know where your data's being stored,
and know who's watching it.
I know Kevin's going to talk a little bit more about security. And those are important concepts
to understand as well when you're picking your cloud providers.
Anna: Thanks, Pat. Moving on to timeframes. As you can see here underneath the image
of the clock, we actually have a breakdown by region and how many respondents
in those regions said that they were going to be moving and how quickly.
What we did see is 53% plan to move a significant portion of their IT to the cloud within three years.
A good TechSoup friend, Alan Gunn of Aspiration, has put it succinctly.
The cloud is not a fad. It's not going away.
We see providers and our donor partners who we work with,
moving more and more of their software to the cloud.
So what we are doing as part of our mission is trying to help nonprofits and libraries
be prepared for that. We don't want to see nonprofits and libraries left behind
because they don't have enough knowledge or enough resources,
whether that's people skills or dollars to make this move. So we're trying to help guide you
and get you where you need to be in a safe way that works with your organization.
However, 36% said they have no plans to move to the cloud, which was interesting. No plans at all,
not within the next three years, because one of our categories was more than three years.
76% said they have no plans to move to the cloud. So that was an interesting bit.
And then, medium sized organizations, those with ten to 44 fulltime staff,
reported that they had the most aggressive timeframe with 22% reporting
that they plan to move to the cloud within one year. So we saw a lot of medium sized organizations
saying that's where they're going. Again, why is that?
I could speculate but we didn't get to the why's in the survey.
Sorry. Before we move on, Pat or Kevin, does either of you want to jump in on timeframe
and this slide?
Pat: No, I don't think so. Sorry, Anna.
Anna: Okay, so what are some of the application types that NGOs are most likely to adopt?
You can see up here file storage and sharing was the Number 1 app that folks were likely to adopt.
Again, maybe folks have already. Maybe some of these organizations have already adopted some
other ones. But this goes with some of the data we presented earlier
where we saw that email and file sharing and social media were ones that were already adopted.
So you can see file sharing and email were two of the greatest app types
that folks are moving to the cloud.
I saw a question earlier that ties into this, and that was,
do I put my donor management data in the cloud?
Donor management and grants data is very sensitive stuff, right? It's secure.
It needs to be secure. It's mission-critical. One thing that NTen pointed out in their survey,
or in their report, was that folks said, oh, no, I'm not putting this mission-critical,
highly secure data in the cloud. But they had their email in the cloud.
And we bet that they talk in their email about their donors, talk with their donors,
proposals go back and forth via email. So be mindful that even in your not putting your CRM
or your donor management or grant management specifically into the cloud in an app,
you might be putting it there inadvertently by using file storage in the cloud or email in the cloud.
And you need to be mindful of how you do that, and how secure those are.
And really, some of it is about procedures in your office, not even the technology,
but what do you allow people to send via email or put in file storage, and how secure are those,
are your backups? So these are things to keep in mind as you go through.
And as you can see on the right, the larger organizations reported that they were likely
to move to more CRM, more complex apps. And small and medium sized organizations,
their answers weren't different from these percentages
that you see here represented in this chart.
Kevin, do you want to jump in here?
Kevin: I also want to follow up on that point about proposals. As many of you know,
many funders actually are also thinking about the same question.
In our survey we also found that there is ambivalence in that area where funders
are wondering to what extent their migration to the cloud will affect the sector.
I think many of us are applying to grants online now, and that's been going on for years,
even before the whole cloud phenomenon became quite ubiquitous.
So I think this is a sector-wide change that we have to be aware of.
To the point about file sharing, yes, as we become more mobile that will become more apparent
as well. Recently here in San Francisco Box.net which is a big provider of file storage,
had a conference. And the founder and some of his funders were mentioning that this is the trend.
A lot of sort of cottage industry is popping out from this online file storage, so it is happening now.
What is most interesting to me was when [AVC] was saying that he used the cloud all the time.
Now, these are the guys that actually fund these companies,
and they feel confident about storing files on the Internet and in the cloud.
So I think there's the vote of confidence. But we don't know, for example,
which files they actually are going to actually put in this storage. They may have some critical files
that they store on-site encrypted somewhere which is likely to be the case.
So it's not an either-or proposition. It's not like you move everything to the cloud
and nothing remains. And we'll point out the fact that you probably do need to backup
some of those things, the data in the cloud, into your own servers
as a way to access them when you can't access the cloud services.
Pat: I'll add on here. When we're talking about security, 'cause security always comes up.
It's always an issue. You know, is my data in the cloud secure?
And I kind of go back to the point of know who your vendor is, and know where your data's
being stored. A number of the larger providers are going to go through various compliances
whether it's HIPAA compliance or go through SASS-70 audits
that basically look at their processes and their procedures and how data is handled
in their facilities to assure some safety and some security.
There is no absolute safe and secure anywhere, including in your office.
My guess is most of your organizations, at least a lot of the organizations I work with have a firewall,
and it's the same firewall that's being sold over and over again.
And believe me, hackers, if they want to get in there, they generally can get in there pretty quickly
if they're any good. Now that's not to say Microsoft cloud isn't going to get hacked.
It absolutely is going to get hacked from time to time, and there's people trying to get in there
all day long. The difference is, Microsoft has hundreds of people,
probably it's about thousands that monitor those servers all day long,
and monitor those securities and try to patch those back-doors if any that are open
and try to prevent any security breaches. That's generally not something we have in our office.
So I don't want to paint the picture that it's not risky to have your data in the cloud.
It's risky to have your data anywhere and you should always just take
as many security precautions as possible. And most importantly,
know who your vendor is and know where your data's being stored.
Anna: Great. Thanks, Pat.
And we're going to jump to some questions here. I see one about, what's the benefit of a public library
using cloud technology? Just quickly I want to touch on —
we have another cloud webinar that we did a year or so ago that we'll send out the link to after this.
But the public library, it really depends on which computers you're talking about.
If you're talking about your public access computers, actually cloud technologies
have a lot to offer, because then your users aren't trying to store their data
on your public access computers. And they can come in, go to any computer,
or go to a different library if they're using cloud technologies, and their data is in the cloud.
So they can get their Google Doc or their Office, their Excel doc from anywhere.
So we think there are a lot of benefits to cloud technology for public access computing.
It also helps you keep your terminals, your machines cleaner and more secure
if people aren't storing things on those desktops.
So let's move quickly to Kevin and some of his cloud tech planning tips and security.
Kevin: Thanks, Anna. I'm going to run through these fairly quickly
because I think we touched on them a little bit earlier, and the next slide is about security
and I know a lot of folks are interested in that.
So the key point that I want to make is that cloud doesn't change everything.
It's the migration of technology, technology trends that we've seen over the years,
and how nonprofits have responded. Even before the term cloud, I think many of you may be familiar
with the term ASP for Application Service Providers, which is to an extent is similar,
a same thing. UIT is not necessary. It doesn't respond to the type of IT that's out there
but rather how you run your organization. Do you have a lot of off-site staff?
Or do you have mostly people coming in? Do you have a lot of confidential data
that's paper-based that you need to keep paper-based in your office?
So it's important to think about those aspects rather than the cloud is happening,
do I need to change it?
I think the point about cost, we mentioned SalesForce. SalesForce is a great example
of them giving you ten free licenses in the United States here.
But the actual migration cost could be very costly for those with existing data bases.
I've seen a lot of positive and negative experiences of just having that transition period hampered
in normal operations and how some data may not fully migrate well,
and there are other things you need to do. There's some supplementary costs.
So be prepared to migrate if it's something as important as your database.
There's some orgs that can use cloud better than others.
And the point about the capital expenses and operating expenses,
if you are mostly grant funded, you get a chunk of grant monies in the beginning
that you can use some of it for IT. You may not have the luxury of being able to pay
for subscription services. And those subscription service prices may change.
So you may want to figure out am I going to be paying more in the future for extra storage,
for example? Do I need to upgrade sooner than I would think? If you control your own IT expenses,
then you can actually figure that out and throw that into your tech plan.
The point about staff training, I think for those who use a lot of interns and volunteers
coming out of college, for example, they are actually using the cloud very much.
So if you intend to use those kinds of staff, it may be easier for them to use an Office365.
They may be able to work from home versus if you're using staff that have been in the industry
for a long time, they know their office back and forth. They know all the keyboard shortcuts.
They know how to do their pivot tables by shortcut. They may be harder for them to transition
into something in the cloud. And bear in mind that using — now we're talking about Office —
there might be a difference in features and functionality that you should be aware of.
If those features are important to you, then you have to know what you're missing out in a cloud.
And the security in the cloud, I know we're running short in time but I do want to point out that,
instead of asking the question is the cloud secure, it's better to ask, are you secure?
Is your staff prepared, security-minded? Do they leave their stations logged on
when they work in a cafeé Do they lose their mobile devices?
Do they leave their passwords on Post-its in their office? If your staff aren't security minded,
then they will remain to be not security minded when they work in the cloud.
So they might leave their Google login available. They might lose their computer
with your important data. Even if it's in cloud, you can access it.
The analogy I like to give is, is it safer to travel by air or by car?
Well, you get high profile incidents in the air, such as 9/11 of course. But if you travel by car,
you actually run into a lot of accidents. You may have a greater risk of accidents.
So they're not necessarily, so if we talk about cloud, you have high profile hacks
that happen to LinkedIn where they lost encrypted passwords. You have Google being down.
Those are high profile, but the probability of that happening to you is much slimmer
than you actually tripping on your power cord for your server.
So it's a better way to think of it that way, less so than cloud is secure or not secure.
And we allude to Gunner's presentation that's on a slide show that we will give you a link to,
Security is a process, not a state." So regardless of whether you're on a cloud or on premise,
you have to be redundant. You have to keep your data, periodically get your data from the cloud
and store it somewhere so you can use it in case you need to access it.
Know about which mission-critical data you're willing to put out there,
but have confidence in which your vendor encrypts their data [indistinct].
And yes, be prepared for data loss as you would in a traditional on-premise environment.
And a point on the HIPAA that folks on chat mentioned,
yes, a Google or a vendor that's specific to health sources will ensure that it is HIPAA compliant.
But it's more likely that they're HIPAA compliant than you are to store your data on a cloud.
I think the compliance landscape is still evolving in a sense that what about the rules
of data residency, for example. Some countries may if a country periodically for migration reasons
moved their data to a country that has less data restrictions, are you not in compliance?
Those are more complex questions that enterprises are trying to answer.
But for our purposes, I think I would say on the aggregate the cloud is probably more secure
than your own, if you don't have that security mindset.
Dawn: Thank you Kevin. This is Dawn.
Unfortunately, we ran out of time and so we're going to have to wrap up today.
I'd like to thank Kevin, Anna, and Patrick for their great content contributions
and the audience for being very interactive.
I know that we're going to have quite a few things that we're going to want to take over
to our community forum to answer there. And don't forget you will get the email in one to two days
with all the resources and some of the things that were shared in chat
will also be shared with you via that email.
So I just want to thank everybody, thank our behind-the-scenes folks also
for helping us out today. As well I'll thank ReadyTalk,
our wonderful sponsor for the webinar platform.
I'm going to stop the meeting, and there should be a pop-up survey.
We would really appreciate it if you would fill that out. It's very short.
It does help us shape our webinars in the future. And it sounds like some people
in this particular webinar had some good ideas for future cloud webinars
that we'd really to hear from you. Also, you will get that survey link in the follow-up email.
If you can't do it right now, we would appreciate it at any point that you can give us the feedback.
So thank you all. And we're signing off.
Have a great day.