Heath Brownsworth

The capabilities, agility and scale offered by cloud computing are too great to ignore. As such, it is becoming increasingly difficult for IT Departments around the world to look the other way and pretend that the cloud is simply a fad and that life will soon return to business as usual. This is the conclusion reported by ComputerWorldUK after February’s Cloud Connect Conference in Santa Clara. Is this an an anomaly? No, similar reports are coming in from every sector. Interest in the cloud is not isolated to any one geography, industry, class of software or type of computing.

There do, however, seem to be several commonalities across organizations moving to the cloud or that are considering getting at least some of their computing power from the cloud. First, these organizations report that the increasing sophistication of the business’s processes has outstripped IT’s ability to provide in-house computing solutions for these needs in a timely manner. Second, business decision makers in these organizations now have access to better technology at home than they do at work. Further, they procured it themselves without ever having to ‘install’ or ‘maintain’ anything. The inevitable question they ask, “Why can’t we do this at work?”.

As many already now the answer to that question is that you ‘can’ and without the help of IT. While no one is promoting the subversion of organizational policy, simple, rapid and efficient provisioning is a hallmark of many cloud solutions. Therefore the message to Enterprise IT seems clear: evolve, adapt, or run the risk of becoming irrelevant.

Heath-

(Cross-posted @ Skywriting)