CLOUD COMPUTING I SNIA EUROPE
The partnership between in-house IT professionals and IT solution providers will allow the in-house IT teams to become more strategic to the business in the era of cloud computing. SaaS and other cloud services by their nature and design will already remove a lot of the traditional requirements around tactical management and maintenance from the in-house IT organization. And by partnering with IT solution providers, the in-house teams will be freed up from traditional responsibilities including user support and account provisioning, desktop and server management, network monitoring, server and storage availability, and holistic IT security.
In-house IT teams will be able to focus their time and resources on what is core and critical to their business, on proprietary applications and systems, on business intelligence and data analytics, and on employee productivity and empowerment. In-house IT professionals will play more of a role in the strategic planning aspects of the business and will have additional responsibilities concerning finance and budgeting, OpEx versus CapEx decisions, return on investment (ROI) and total costs of ownership (TCO) analyses, and the like.
The role of in-house IT will focus more on business process improvement, process design, and organizational structure. Partnering with IT solution providers, in-house IT teams will craft technology strategies incorporating the appropriate balance
between cloud
computing and on- premise
technologies which integrates
into business
processes, which delivers a competitive advantage, enables agility and innovation, increases
efficiencies and time-to- market, and
yields automation, productivity, and
reduced operating costs.
Thus, the new expression which starting to arise which says that the IT organization of the future “will have as many MBAs and MCSEs.”
In-house IT teams will be able to focus their time and resources on what is core and critical to their business, on proprietary applications and systems, on business intelligence and data analytics, and on employee productivity
Meanwhile, businesses and in-house IT professionals will look to their IT solution provider to continue playing the role as the “trusted IT advisor” while also playing the new role of the Virtual CEO, or the “Cloud Experience Owner.” In playing the role of the Virtual CEO, the IT solution provider aims to find the proper balance between giving the business the option to tap into the almost unlimited amount of technology capacity and functionality while ensuring a simple, consistent, and reliable user experience for the employees and executives. The Virtual CEO role means taking ownership of the cloud computing solutions being leveraged by the business, ensuring vendor and service provider published Service level Agreements (SLA) are met, and monitoring performance and security of cloud computing solutions. The Virtual CEO becomes the help desk for the employees to answer basic questions and provide baseline IT user support. The Virtual CEO helps to customize SaaS applications and to integrate cloud technologies to business processes in order to meet the specific needs of the company. Lastly, in acting as the Virtual CEO, the IT solution provider works with the in-house IT team in their role of designing and reengineering business processes in a way that derive maximum benefits of cloud computing technologies.
The emergence of cloud computing technologies further enables the IT department evolution from being primarily internally focused, and unfortunately seen as a cost center, to being more externally focused, seen as a strategic business asset which creates competitive advantages, dynamically responds to customer preferences, and reduces overall operating costs.
This evolution of the role of internal IT department will also be enabled by partnerships with IT solution providers who can offer deep and certified expertise in specific technology verticals, can assume tactical and non-value-added IT workloads, and who can provide consultancy and services critical to the integration of cloud computing technology to business systems and processes. Despite some of the hype, cloud computing technologies are more an addition to traditional on-premise technologies than a complete replacement of. Not everything will ‘move to the Cloud.’ The truth is that while we say this is an Era of the Cloud, in reality this will be a Hybrid IT world. As such a hybrid model of IT management, via partnerships between in-house IT professionals and IT solution providers, is most appropriate and advantageous.
WWW.SNSEUROPE.COM | SEPTEMBER 2011 9
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