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Chief Technology Officers (CTO) and Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) in today’s competitive landscape are often faced with making the tough decision to move operations (partially or entirely) to the cloud. This means letting go of legacy infrastructures – such as on-premises PBX phone systems – and embracing the versatility of Internet-based solutions.

For most of its existence, the cloud – particularly business-oriented cloud solutions – has been plagued by one major concern: security. It’s understandable. Keeping your data locked in a room on your site offers a sense of control. But it’s no safer than in a data center managed by experts who make it their business to secure the data. Data centers are a solid investment today, and executives are beginning to wake up and smell the roses.

Security still a topic of discussion

This doesn’t mean security is off the C-suite’s radar. Not by far, actually. However, according to Don McLean, cloud veteran and managing director of Fronde Australia, the discussion has shifted from security to innovation in recent years.

“People will always talk about security, ‘Where’s my data?’, and so forth, and that’s not going to go away,” he told journalists at a lunchtime briefing in Sydney, Australia, according to Zdnet. “[But] it’s become less of a top-five issue than it was in the past, and it’s more now about ‘OK, I want to lower my cost of doing business. I want to increase the amount of innovation that I’ve got. […] That conversation will happen regardless,” [but it’s not] “top worry,” he said.

Security advisor James Turner (of IBRS), agrees that “there’s much wider acceptance of cloud computing.” Getting better service trumps security fears. And let’s not forget that cloud services can often be much cheaper than legacy solutions, causing CEOs to see dollar signs before their eyes.

Email gets obsoleted by collaboration solutions

McLean made another interesting point during his Thursday briefing. He said startups in the Valley operate very differently from traditional companies – they use collaboration tools and it is working wonders for them. One of the examples he uttered was email vs. collaboration apps.

“You look at startups in Silicon Valley […] and it’s a different way of working. The debate about what email system to use is largely over. It’s now more about what collaboration system you will use,” he said.

The reason why email as an office tool is dying is because email is being primarily used as a text messaging tool, or one to send files – both being easily realized (with infinitely better results) by solutions like Hubgets. With email, messages get lost or forgotten because it’s not real time, while files clog up the network or even fail to be delivered. In today’s connected world, email is beginning to look long in the tooth to say the least.

In fact, Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) solutions are sought precisely because of their promise of speed, security, reliability, and the ability to scale the service up or down based on preference and demand. With this much versatility on hand, it’s no wonder security has fallen a few positions on the list of top concerns.