Technology shifts have always created new challenges and opportunities for IT, but cloud computing is different, both in the magnitude and speed of change.
This is according to the EMEA chairman at CA Technologies, Patrick Starck, giving the keynotes at the CA IT Management Symposium Africa 2011 conference which kicked off yesterday.
He told the conference attendees that technology should enable customers to manage and secure IT environments and get flexibility from IT services.
“Agility is important for companies of all sizes to effectively respond to customer demands, competitors, regulatory mandates and disruptive technologies.”
Cloud computing is a disruptive transformation for IT, he pointed out. “Cloud offerings allow the business to directly access external services, creating security holes and quality blind spots while potentially eroding enterprise IT's perceived value,” he added.
However, he said cloud computing can enable businesses to adapt to rapidly changing market and customer needs. Cloud is not a new technology, it is an enabling technology that is being used in a new way, he pointed out.
“This technology is about driving agility and adding power so organisations can meet their business objectives,” he added.
Starck told the conference that, the impact of cloud computing is far greater than the sum of its parts, driving a rapidly unfolding revolution with far-reaching impact not only on how IT is managed, but on the very nature of IT's role and relationship to the business.
He reckons the difference today is that there are many organisations out there focusing their resources on their core competencies and using cloud IT to manage their company. In fact, we have met a number of emerging companies at this event that were moving all their services to the cloud.
He advised IT managers to accelerate their path to agility with control. “The cloud revolution can not only be made to work in IT's favour, but actually transform IT into a more agile, efficient business innovator,” he said.
At the same time, he said, IT needs to transform itself into the master of a dynamic service supply chain, driving smart sourcing decisions and orchestrating how internal, external, virtual, and traditional resources work together to optimise business value, he told the conference.
“With cloud computing reshaping the way IT delivers services to business users, the perception of IT as a cost centre is giving way to an appreciation of IT's true role as a powerful growth engine for the business,”
“Cloud computing enables customers to share infrastructure resources and dynamically match IT costs to business requirements. In order to reap all of the benefits that cloud computing offers, IT professionals need to standardise, simplify and automate how they provision and manage end-to-end business services.
There has long been a mismatch between the speed of innovation and change the business needs and the time it takes for IT to deliver. Whether the business needs a development environment, more capacity from an existing service, or automation to improve a business process, IT has struggled to deliver at the pace of business.
After years of chafing under these constraints, the business now finds a rapidly growing number of options beyond its internal IT, provided as public cloud services.
With every previous generation, new IT capabilities enabled whole new types of problems to be solved. Cloud is the same way, and there will be opportunities to create new solutions that can't be solved other ways.
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