More than ever, CIOs must fight to keep their companies' cloud strategies grounded in business reality and prepared for the future.
So says Mark Ridley, regional director of NetApp Africa, who says there is no hotter topic in business technology right now than cloud computing. He adds, like many other rapidly popularised technologies, the cloud has inspired its fair share of advocates and detractors, with opinions often drawn from both fact and fiction alike. As a result, today's CIOs - who must view cloud usage strategically, not theoretically or anecdotally - often find themselves fighting a multi-front battle.
CIOs today must mitigate fears and manage expectations internally, while simultaneously defining terms and contingencies with cloud service providers. "To complicate matters further, while these critical conversations and negotiations are unfolding, CIOs often have to make tough decisions to restructure their own teams to best meet new - and quickly shifting - operational realities," says Ridley.
"To top it all off, applications must be architected to take full advantage of the productivity improvements and operational realities the cloud can provide."
Ridley notes that no one can fault a CIO for wondering if adopting a cloud strategy is worth the trouble, especially when that CIO already has a roadmap packed with new technology deployments. "Understanding that a move to cloud technology can be quite complicated allows a CIO to move forward thoughtfully and strategically, priming the organisation to most effectively and efficiently capitalise on the benefits a strong cloud strategy offers, without compromising other future plans for the information technology architecture."
If done right, those benefits can be myriad, he points out, but an effective cloud strategy must always align with an IT organisation's overall enterprise architecture plans.
For Ridley, adopting a hybrid approach that employs private software as a service, infrastructure as a service and platform as a service to host everything from outward-facing applications, such as social media and file sharing, to more proprietary ones, such as CRM and development environments used by engineering teams, can offer substantial advantages.
With the adoption of cloud technology, organisations can see significant increases in time-to-delivery for new applications, which results in the better utilisation of storage capacity and millions of dollars in savings on hardware and software support costs, he says.
However, these results can happen only when agility is included as a design principle for IT systems, notes Ridley. Only by embracing agility will CIOs be able to deliver on the promise inherent in cloud computing.
He concludes that such changes don't happen overnight. "The road to a successful cloud deployment can be a long one, with many twists and turns. Some CIOs make the mistake of thinking their organisations are more than ready for the transition than they actually are, an assumption that can cause some serious growing pains and misunderstandings."
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