They're embracing new technologies and service models to deliver IT faster, cheaper and smarter—while making their companies more responsive and competitive.
How? The cloud, of course...
Cloud computing is at the forefront of this dramatic shift in IT. As Richard Bliss explains, the reason isn't hard to understand:
Techies will blather about how it allows you to pool resources, deliver self-service provisioning, scale elastically, and so on. But the simple fact is that cloud computing can offer real benefits to your business.
The trend is undeniable: Organizations are increasingly:
- seeking to harness the speed, flexibility, and economics of the public cloud;
- looking to integrate public cloud services to offer predictable costs, faster provisioning, and "infinite" scale; and
- turning to hybrid cloud environments to optimize costs, seize opportunities, and mitigate risks.
It's a whole new reality: Data seamlessly traveling across multiple clouds, while giving IT the necessary controls to centrally manage and govern the data.
As David Amerland tells it, the impact of cloud computing is considerable and disruptive—but in a good way:
Disruption is good—at least, home-grown disruption is. The challenge requires adaptation, which plays to our Darwinistic notions of how businesses evolve, strive to survive, and come out stronger.
...
The move to the cloud takes the IT department out of the backwoods and into the core of the organization. ... The transition to the cloud is also a change in the very DNA of the corporation.
And as Annalisa Camarillo comments, the service model in general, and the cloud model in particular, are disrupting everything:
The elimination of massive, up-front capital outlay in favor of an elastic, “pay-as-you-go, pay-as-you-need” system allows smaller, more nimble companies to gain all the advantages of an IT Department without tying up capital they may have better uses for. That’s the power of cloud.
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If you aren’t taking advantage...your sunk capital costs and lack of agility may sink you.
But can you get there from here? This new reality needs something better than the typical legacy technology. It requires:
- seamless cloud management: doing away with the old control headaches of managing discrete cloud resources,
- a universal data platform: the same across all types of cloud environments—from private to public to hybrid models,
- efficiency boosting, dynamic data portability—across all clouds,
- true customer choice for application, technology, and partner options.
Jay Kidd, NetApp's CTO, sums it up:
CIOs care about delivering applications and managing information that their organizations depend on to operate. ... CIOs now seek is to view all [their] options through a service lens. ... So the challenge then moves from building clouds to managing the interaction between the clouds. ... This is where common technologies across clouds deliver the most value.
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Hybrid clouds are new, and a lot of experience is yet to be gained before the CIO’s goal of managing an integrated portfolio of IT services can be fully realized. But those customers...and those service providers [using common technologies] already have a head start.
The Bottom Line
It's no longer a question of 'if' you move to cloud computing, but 'when' you move. Don't leave it too late.
Also, don't miss the opportunity to unify your data platform and ensure portability: Your data is one of the most important, strategic resources you control, so make it easy to use and manage.
Are you moving at least some of your business to the cloud? If not, when? Weigh in with a comment below...
By Richi Jennings (@richi)
Image credit: Robbert van der Steeg (cc:by-sa)
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