The Role of IT in the Cloud Era

"Can I get this done without going to IT?" simply wasn't an option for most enterprise projects in the past. However, the explosion of software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings has led non-IT people to start questioning when--and even if--they need to bring IT into the picture. IT has often been perceived as the bottleneck, creating pent-up frustrations that lead people to look for ways to decrease IT’s involvement or bypass it altogether.

The availability of enterprise SaaS offerings has given business users options that require significantly less IT involvement or even none at all. These solutions eliminate much of the infrastructure work that used to consume IT, giving people outside of IT new alternatives. Take the case of CRM systems — CRM implementation used to be a huge IT project, but with the rise of cloud-based CRM systems it's now become something that is commonly driven and owned by sales operations, with only a small amount of IT involvement. Add to that the share of spend and budget that is not owned by IT and there's a real question of whether IT has lost its influence.

It's clear that IT's role needs to change, but how? In this slideshow, Snowflake's CEO, Bob Muglia, outlines a few tips on how IT organizations are adapting to their role in the era of the cloud.