The “cloudification of services” means that IT has become the backbone for every other part of the enterprise, and the department needs to evolve in order to keep up with the pace of change. That’s what Frank Slootman, president and CEO of ServiceNow, told the audience during his keynote at the platform-as-as-service IT solution provider’s Knowledge 14 conference, taking place at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco. “We really think IT needs to start thinking […]
CIO
In my last post, I talked about the IT side of the “shadow IT” problem that cloud computing has created for companies all over the world. Cloud computing has enabled end-users to remove IT departments from the decision process when hiring solutions, especially software solutions, and also to keep these same IT departments out of the loop by using cloud-based applications that can be accessed through the browser, without any kind of installation or IT […]
The hidden costs were explored in a new survey of 468 CIOs, conducted by Research In Action and underwritten by Compuware Corporation. There’s no question a lot of money is going into cloud projects — two-thirds of the respondents say that cloud is their top investment area for 2013. Many have crunched the numbers for the up-front costs of cloud computing, which typically include subscription fees, combined with some level of staff time required for set-up, user […]
I think the enterprises of the future will look very different from those of today. Organizations will become leaner and more virtualized as their business processes grow more reliant on ecosystem partners. Process boundaries will transcend a specific entity. Many macroeconomists believe that real shareholder value (and, ultimately, economic growth) will be driven by the speed and quality of innovation. Historically, enterprises have been successful by capitalizing on a disruption (market transition) that plays into […]
CIOs are worried: cloud computing is being used as a way for businesses to dodge the IT department and get services delivered more quickly. But as well as giving the CIO sleepless nights, this attempt to side-step the IT department is causing additional cost and complexity along the way. I recently wrote about how cloud computing deployments are kicking off without the CIO’s knowledge, and only coming to light when sys admins put their expenses […]
CIOs have tied their future career prospects very much to the mast of cloud computing, with recent research revealing that they believe cloud computing is shifting the focus of their role away from primarily technology onto vital business services, and increasing their chances of promotion to CEO. In a global survey of 615 CEOs, including Australian CIOs, 57 percent of the Australian respondents said that’s what they believed about the affects of cloud computing on […]
The CIO as we understand the role is under threat from Cloud Computing and ICT professionals need to start getting smart about their function. That was the stark warning from Oracle, a company whose conversion to the Cloud has taken time to go public. While once dismissed by CEO Larry Ellison as “just water vapour”, Cloud is now firmly on the Oracle road map as a top priority. Hence the appearance of John Abel, chief […]
It seems that every networking event this year, every tech magazine issue, and every vendor worth its salt is talking about “the cloud.” The cloud, in one of its many forms – public, private, or mixed – has become ubiquitous! I’ll confess: I started off my cloud gazing with little interest and several doubts, but I’ve learned a lot over the past year about the potential benefits of obtaining software, platform, and infrastructure as cloud […]
Industry experts and cloud service providers are hopeful about the prospects of a new federal program that sets cloud computing security standards, but they also note some potential pitfalls. For one security expert, the program represents a lost chance to improve cybersecurity. The Obama Administration last month launched the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), which sets a standard approach for assessing the security of cloud services and products against a baseline of controls. […]
For today’s CIO, the perceived barriers to cloud computing remain security, regulation and compliance. The danger that data loss poses to brand equity, customer trust and share price is just the same whether data is stored in a cloud computing or traditional infrastructure model. The severity of the issue is reflected in legislation like the recent Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill which states that the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) now has the authority to levy […]
Next month – all being well – the UK Cabinet Office will lift the lid on what form the UK public sector Cloud Computing strategy will take. Notably absent from the national ICT strategy announced back in April, Cloud has not been forgotten, but the grandiose plans for an over-arching G-Cloud that were being formulated under the New Labour administration have been scaled down. Exactly what form the revised Cloud thinking will take remains to […]
If you came here for the article with the title, “How Cloud Computing Will Change IT”, unfortunately, it has been removed at the request of the publisher of the website from which it was obtained. Asking me to remove it was within their rights, but I believe it was a shortsighted decision based on old media ideas about the copyright “protection” of assets and the imagined potential loss of ad revenue. I am not competing […]
H&R Block’s virtualization project is putting thin clients in the tax preparer’s thousands of retail stores in an effort to simplify its operating environment and cut expenses. The change should also help it to better compete with chains such as Jackson Hewitt, as well as with independent tax preparers and software-only rivals such as TurboTax and Intuit (INTU). “Typical of any mature company, the competitive landscape is tough. You’re continually looking at ways to optimize,” […]
A quick look at the trends facing most CIOs should send anyone with a large IT budget into a state of worry. In every dimension, CIOs are facing an increased pace of change at the same time they are losing control over the computing environment. The number of assets they must manage is exploding. Consumerization, virtualization, cloud computing, software as a service, mobility are all increasing the complexity of the job of managing IT by […]
A new IBM study of more than 3,000 global CIOs shows that 60 per cent of organisations are ready to embrace cloud computing over the next five years as a means of growing their businesses and achieving competitive advantage. That’s nearly double the number of CIOs who said they would utilise cloud in IBM’s 2009 CIO study. As demand for ever-growing amounts of information continues to increase, companies are seeking simple and direct access to […]
According to reports issued over the weekend, the US federal government has chosen 100 data centers to close over the course of this year, part of a larger overall government plan to reduce IT spending, in large part through outsourcing operations to hosting service providers. The government’s plan involves moving resources to “cloud computing” environments, which in a lot of old school IT organizations (and as US organization go, the federal government is pretty old-school) […]
In a troubled economy, cloud computing seems like a great cost saving alternative and it is. Whether in good times or bad, any pragmatic cost saving measure is a ‘good’ measure. Google, Microsoft, IBM and all other known and unknown cloud providers offer today’s CIO an array of major cost saving alternatives to the traditional data center and IT department. The temptation to put things on/in the cloud and sit back can be extremely compelling. […]
If you came here for the article with the title, “How Cloud Computing Helps a Business Grow”, unfortunately, it has been removed at the request of the publisher of the website from which it was obtained. Asking me to remove it was within their rights, but I believe it was a shortsighted decision based on old media ideas about the copyright “protection” of assets and the imagined potential loss of ad revenue. I am not […]
About 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies surveyed recently said they expect 15 percent or more of their applications to move to the cloud in the near future, Sarah Friar, managing director at Goldman Sachs, said Wednesday at ITSEF. That shift has even affected Goldman Sachs, “where we’re probably the most paranoid about letting go of these things,” she said. Cloud computing, mobile computing and social networking are reshaping the face of the information security […]
Frank Modruson has a thing for better, faster, cheaper. As CIO of business and IT service provider Accenture, that’s what he wants to deliver to his internal customers and what they in turn promise to their clients. “I’m a big believer in technology and a big believer that technology helps the business in a lot of ways,” Modruson says. “But it needs to be better, faster or cheaper. If you hit all three, it starts […]
Back in April 2009, McKinsey set the cloud computing community afire with a presentation arguing that corporate cloud computing adopters might expend more money using cloud versus traditional data center resources. As reported by Steve Lohr in the NYTimes Bits blog: “The McKinsey study, “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing,” concludes that outsourcing a typical corporate data center to a cloud service would more than double the cost.” Many in the cloud computing space, including […]
Businesses concerned about the security of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud technology should be more worried about how they secure data themselves rather than the levels of security offered by cloud providers. A recent survey by Forrester Research found that security is the main concern about IaaS technology for 58 per cent of European technology decision-makers. And these concerns – combined with others – appear to be hampering adoption, with just two per cent […]
Investing in private clouds is a top priority for IT organizations in 2011, according to two recent online polls, Unisys said on Jan. 26. The two polls were conducted on the Unisys Web site. The first poll, in December 2010, asked visitors about their cloud computing implementation plans. The second poll, asking visitors to name their organization’s biggest investment priority in 2011, was conducted a month later and completed on Jan. 24. In the January […]
Internal departments buying their own IT may force the hand of the CIO into making an early move to the cloud. But that shift will alter the traditional role of the CIO forever, says Steven Salmon. Over the next few years, cloud computing is set to transform the way CIOs operate. More organisations will turn to cloud products such as software as a service (SaaS), which will continue to mature. Driving the increased uptake is […]
Cloud computing will be a hit with chief information officers (CIOs) this year as adoption will happen quicker than expected, an analyst firm has claimed. Just three per cent of CIOs currently have the majority of IT running in the cloud or on software-as-a-service technologies, but over the next four years CIOs expect this to rise to 43 per cent, a Gartner survey showed. “CIOs and IT have been boxed in between modest budget growth […]
As the dominant IT paradigm continues to shift, companies need to manage critical components of the migration. Companies still face plenty of questions regarding cloud computing. Increasingly, however, the dominant question is not whether to do it, but how intensely. In fact, given the pace at which companies are offloading at least part of their IT infrastructure to public clouds (generally defined as third-party services that host computing workloads in multi-tenant data centers), those that […]