Some businesses will take ‘baby steps’ and some will jump right in, but everyone is going to start thinking about taking their IT services into the cloud.

That’s the message Intergen COO, Simon Bright, gave at the company’s Dynamics Day conference today.

Bright addressed around 200 guests and Intergen staff at the event, being held in Auckland for the first time after two successful events in Wellington.

"The release of Office 365 recently will be a lot of people’s first step into the cloud,” Bright says.

"From here we expect some will take baby steps but some will jump right in.”

Intergen CTO Chris Auld told the audience the strongest driver of cloud computing is the ability to purchase it as a utility rather than a product.

"There’s actually nothing new in cloud computing technology-wise,” Auld says.

"If you’ve had a hotmail account you’ve used cloud.  The important thing is the ability to only pay for what you use.”

Auld says this gives IT managers the ability to make more relevant cost predictions.

"Instead of getting a three-year contract, you get predictable costs applied to something you actually care about, like per user or per customer.”

Auld adds that although start-up costs will be intimidating for small businesses, owners should consider service benefits such as reliability and security.

"If you’ve got ten staff and your server goes down, how much is it costing you to have them all out of action?”

Image: Dynamics Day shows off its POS software at the ‘Yellow Shop’.