Business Leaders Starting to Exert More Cloud Control
As organizations get more comfortable with cloud computing, something interesting is starting to take place. A new survey of 146 business and IT leaders conducted by Capgemini finds that business people are starting to play a much stronger role in selecting what cloud computing platforms and applications are used in the enterprise. While this phenomenon has been building, Ron Tolido, senior vice president and CTO of applications for Capgemini in Continental Europe, says that for the first time it’s clear that business executives are taking the lead when it comes to cloud computing.
Specifically, the survey found that 45.2 percent of those surveyed said it was now the business side that made most of the decisions related to cloud computing, compared to 46 percent for IT.
Whether this dead heat represents a permanent state of IT in the cloud is anybody’s guess. In the interest of cost cutting and agility, there’s no doubt that business executives played a leading role in bringing cloud computing to the enterprise. But as cloud computing becomes more widely accepted, IT organizations are increasingly being asked to manage these platforms and applications as the overall cloud computing environment gets more complex.
Tolido contends we’ve actually reached a tipping point in terms of business executive influence, many of whom are more interested in business outcomes than the actual technology. In fact, Tolido says that from Capgemini’s perspective, this trend shows that in the long term most organizations will opt to rely on shared public cloud computing resources that provide the greatest economic benefit. It’s anybody’s guess how long it will take for that process to occur, which means the cloud for at least the immediate future is by definition hybrid.
What is for certain, says Tolido, is that the role of IT is changing within the enterprise. Cloud computing puts more emphasis on interoperability and orchestration, says Tolido, which means the IT organization of the future is going to look very much different than it does today.
