The cloud computing revolution has gone from hype to mainstream in a few short years. Its ascendance hasn’t just changed the way enterprises handle their data centre workloads, it has fundamentally changed the way that organizations acquire information technology resources—hardware, software, applications. With public cloud offerings that can be literally purchased on a company credit card, line-of-business managers can activate applications for their departments without even involving IT.
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That doesn’t mean the IT department is irrelevant. But its role has changed from being an internal supplier of computing services and support to being a strategic partner of the business, brokering IT services and becoming more influential and effective agents of revenue growth.
Critical to this is the strategic alignment of public and private cloud assets. Some applications and data must, for security and governance purposes, reside within a private cloud infrastructure that’s not shared with other organizations; some, for the purposes of scalability, are better suited to a public cloud infrastructure. The ability to move computing workloads between clouds is key to the agility and flexibility an enterprise needs to thrive in the competitive landscape.
And the ability to manage these “hybrid clouds” will become even more mission-critical as the explosion of automated sensors and telemetry feeding information to the network—the “Internet of Everything” (IoE)—becomes a more and more important influencer in business decision-making. Connectivity between customers, web sites, parking lots, and checkout lines, for example, will change the face of retail. Vehicle telemetry and geographic location systems will give the enterprise unprecedented, real-time insight into the supply chain. As the number of connected devices rises from 10 billion today to 50 billion in 2020, as much as $14 trillion (U.S.) in net profit will be propelled by IoE.
Download Cisco’s whitepaper Cloud Computing: Changing the Role and Relevance of IT Teams, to learn how:
* Line-of-business executives, particularly in marketing, sales, and customer service, are driving more IT spending than ever before, largely through the cloud. In fact, LoB spending on IT is growing more than twice as fast as spending by the IT department.
* Rogue IT spending is accelerating because of the cloud, raising the risk profile of enterprises.
* Cloud computing can allow the enterprise to respond to new business priorities, changing market conditions, customer or partner feedback, and unforeseen revenue opportunities with agility and flexibility.
* And how the cloud is changing the IT department’s identity from cost centre to strategic partner, allowing the business to shift technology infrastructure costs from CAPEX to OPEX, giving a degree of cost certainty the C-suite has never had before.