In a recent survey a number of CIOs were questioned about Cloud Technology and whether it would be on their radar for inclusion in their IT architecture; more often than not it wasn’t. Just over 50% of CIO’s questioned in BT’ Enterprise Intelligence survey could not see where cost savings could be made.
As we have blogged about time and again here, the biggest concern is security, the survey highlighted this "The majority of CIOs (57 percent) and senior executives (53 percent) surveyed said they were not happy to run applications and store data on servers outside their country for security reasons."
CIOs are a bit wary around another technology shift. You would have to be new in IT not to realise there have been some IT silver bullets over the last 20 years that, well, never really delivered the goods.
So how do we position the cloud to a CIO and highlight the benefits?
- Lets look at what Cloud Technology is; its an architecture to make existing IT systems more effective. Cloud technology should not be a radical change for the business, moreover it should be a tactical deployment (initially) to solve well defined problems which are small by their nature. We typically see cloud being leveraged as part of an overall solution and not the enabler to the solution.
- Undertake a POC, identify areas of the business which could be improved through enhanced availability and improved management information. There is not hardware or software to buy, implement a small none business critical POC and find your feet.
- You need to understand that Cloud computing is a marathon and not a sprint, and will continue to evolve into a platform that is open, portable and above all (hopefully) have formal security processes regulating it.
Handled right, the Cloud can offer massive value to the business.