The changes associated with cloud computing require a fundamental shift in organisational thinking.
This is the word from Bharat Badrinath, EMC senior director: global solutions marketing, ahead of Johannesburg's EMC Forum on 15 August, which will explore how cloud transforms IT, big data transforms business, and trust transforms cloud.
"Cloud computing changes the way IT services are delivered and consumed," says Badrinath. "Delivering IT as a service [ITaaS] offers significant savings in operational costs, as well as advantages in availability, responsiveness, compliance and time-to-market."
However, ITaaS also "requires changes in people and processes", he adds. "These changes are difficult, and require enterprises to re-think their organisational structure, IT skill sets, and to become a broker of IT services."
The transformation required is three-pronged, asserts Badrinath, involving changes to infrastructure, operations and applications.
The cloud brings about unavoidable changes to infrastructure, he explains. "Most IT organisations understand that the days of dedicated infrastructure for each application are long gone. That approach resulted in higher operational expense and lower agility. Widespread adoption of virtualisation fuelled the need for standardised infrastructure."
Transformation to IT operations is another outcome of the cloud. "It is changing the way IT delivers services to the business, as well as how IT operates internally. Delivery moves to a service catalogue, making it easy for users to consume the service. To compete against external service offerings, IT needs financial transparency, and needs to market the services internally."
Because of these changes to IT operations, new roles, such as product management and finance, are appearing within IT, in order to assist IT in delivering cloud to internal users. "IT transforms itself from being a provider of services to a broker of services. What this means is that, in some cases, IT may decide that it is better to source the services from an external provider than build them internally," notes Badrinath.
Finally, the cloud brings about a transformation in applications, he says. "Applications transformation is more than rationalising an existing portfolio of applications. While that is a good starting point, IT needs to start evaluating how applications are delivered and consumed to users. As IT transforms to being a broker of services, different conversations are to be had around whether an application is better sourced from a service provider, or housed internally."
The impact of cloud is not to be underestimated, concludes Badrinath. "IT organisations have been struggling to get more agility and efficiency out of their IT environments. They are spending over two thirds of their IT budgets on keeping the lights on, while not having enough to invest in innovation. Cloud computing offers the answer to this dilemma."
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