Like it or not, the cloudburst of Cloud offerings such as EMC’s Atmos and Atmos Online make it mandatory for users to develop formal Cloud strategies. Not because of all the hype and media coverage, but because the technological innovations being developed today will be the tools of the future. Dozens, if not hundreds, of startups have sprung up with clever Cloud-based products. Many of those will be acquired by the larger players, and their technology will be promoted into the mainstream. Moreover, with EMC continuing to spend 12% of its revenues on R&D and its management focus on the Cloud, we can expect to see a bevy of EMC Cloud innovations, of which its recent announcement of the ability to federate public and private Cloud storage using Atmos is one example.
The first step in getting organized is to understand the type of project/business need before choosing a technology. Then identify the best fit based on the problem. Ask if the Cloud presents a line-of-business (LOB) solution or if it is an IT cost reduction strategy. If the later, responsibility for the technology likely belongs with the IT department. Many have found success in cloud computing by using the Cloud for surges in demand. One example is a company that offers e-mail scanning services via the Web. Most of its work is done in-house, but when demand exceeds capacity, work is shipped off to the Cloud, where it uses three vendors to process the excess work. Three were chosen to ensure application availability. In this example, internal IT has responsibility. On the other hand, if it’s more of a Web 2.0 competing service or a supply chain type of situation (e.g., Salesforce.com or Supplyscape) responsibility may be better off outside of IT’s hands.
Action Item: Organizations should put in place a governance model to provide the parameters of the insourcing/outsourcing decision of Cloud applications based on the edicts of the corporation including security, availability, scalability, time-to-market, costs, etc. Do it now rather than later!
Footnotes:
