Don’t Talk to Me About Cloud

Is your cloud more thunder than lightning?

Extolling its benefits is like championing dietary supplements: Unless you know the precise nutrient deficiency to be remedied, you’re asking for trouble. The wrong supplement endangers health and wastes money. The wrong approach to cloud squanders its vast potential, runs up an organization’s costs, complicates its IT ecosystem, and leaves its business needs unsolved.

Rare is the CIO who hasn’t already invested invest heavily in cloud solutions and intends to do much more of the same. To be sure, many early cloud debuts consisted of toe-in-the-water, risk-averse, security-conscious internal cloud initiatives, only venturing further into hybrid environments as security worries diminished and benefits emerged to fund expansion.

Despite these cautious approaches, cloud usage has exploded. So CIOs don’t need to be coaxed to adopt cloud solutions. But they do need three things outlined in this thought leadership paper if they are to choose, with any degree of efficiency and confidence, the right cloud approach for the highly specific current and future needs of their business.