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NETWORK / 32 / FEBRUARY 2017 C loud computing is big business. Amazon's AWS division, the industry's largest cloud provider, is fast approaching the $10 billion mark in annual revenue, earned by selling computing capacity to businesses and public sector organisations around the world. The rationale for cloud adoption isn't difficult to discover. Instead of making capital investments to acquire computer capacity in large, expensive, inflexible chunks, organisations simply pay a provider for cloud capacity as Cloud computing is revolutionising data management for utilities, but does the future of operations also lie in the cloud? Heading into the clouds CLOUD COMPUTING – through which residential customers can turn their heating on and off remotely from devices such as smartphones – using cloud server capacity from AWS. "Our in-house [servers] worked well up to about 10,000 customers," says Adrian Heesom, Hive chief operating officer at British Gas. "But with the concurrent connections that Hive requires, sending data from the hub in customers' homes to our platform meant that once we had about 25,000 users, the situation became unmanageable." they use it, swapping capital expenditure for cashflow- friendly operating expense. Inevitably, energy utilities are moving to the cloud, using it to run enterprise applications from providers such as SAP, Oracle and Salesforce. UK Power Networks, for instance, has a cloud-based contact centre system, while EDF is rolling out a cloud-based 'self-serve' human resources system to 20,000 UK staff. For its part, British Gas powers its Connected Homes' Hive Active Heating initiative