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Cloud Services Featured Articles

Cloud Services and Consumerization Reinventing IT
July 06, 2012

spacer By Erin Harrison, Executive Editor, Cloud Computing

Cloud services and the rapid shift of accessing enterprise applications on mobile devices are changing the nature of enterprise application delivery and consumption – and changing the role of IT as we know it.

Today, IT organizations are facing increased competition from Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News spacer - Alert)) and cloud providers, who are delivering enterprise applications as a service that are faster, cheaper and accessible anywhere, on any device, according to Bernard Harguindeguy, president and CEO of Atlantis Computing. 

While cloud services give businesses the opportunity to get the applications they need to grow their business instantly, rather than spending months working with their internal IT department, there is increased risk – and IT needs to be a central part of this shift.

“With business owners and employees cutting out the IT middleman, there’s less control of data, difficulty meeting compliance requirements and a general increase in risk,” Harguindeguy wrote in a recent VMblog post.

But IT can balance the forces of cloud, SaaS and consumerization of IT to remain relevant and get users on their side by changing IT processes and trying to match the rate of innovation enabled by cloud providers, according to Harguindeguy.

“IT shouldn’t try to compete with cloud and SaaS services. Instead of fighting the trend, IT should look at itself as a partner to the business owner who helps them determine what types of services and applications should be delivered by internal IT and which should use SaaS or cloud services,” he said.

In many ways, cloud is forcing IT to reinvent itself as a service provider, especially with important considerations such as compliance and costs.

He added, “When a service needs to be customized or must be internal for compliance reasons, IT should view themselves as the service provider to the business that is developing a product or service to compete with outside providers and the existing status quo,” according to the article. “IT should be able to articulate the real cost of the product/service to the business, its features, reliability, performance and the reasons why it's better for internal IT to deliver the service compared to an outside provider.”

For example, Harguindeguy said he sees many VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) project fail because IT didn’t compete effectively against the status quo, in that the virtual desktop IT delivered to the business was slower and more costly than the existing physical computer and employees’ personal devices.

“The reason this happens is that IT generally doesn't view themselves as a service provider to the business and strives to meet the minimum requirements as they understand them,” he said. “If IT were to look to build a virtual desktop service, they would try to understand the business reasons and requirements for using virtual desktops, the competitors such as outsourcing virtual desktops to a Desktop as a Service (DaaS) provider and the alternatives of staying with physical computers. Without understanding business objectives, competitors and alternatives, IT can't build a product or service.”

Another way for IT to “balance the forces” is to embrace the consumerization of IT and mobility.

With more workers bringing in their own iPads, iPhones, Androids and other mobile devices, IT can take advantage of this proliferation by delivering enterprise applications on them to make employees more productive.

“Many companies are doing just that with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs that leverage end user purchased and maintained devices as the user’s primary desktop client or mobile device, while at the same time building the IT infrastructure to support remote access and virtual desktops for those end user devices,” Harguindeguy said.

A third step IT can take is to become a revenue generator by using consumerization of IT, virtualization, the cloud and mobility to help business owners create and deliver new products and services to their customers.

“For example, one of the world’s largest banks is outfitting all of their wealth management salespeople with iPads that can run sophisticated financial analysis that was once only possible on powerful servers,” Harguindeguy concluded. “By using an iPad to remotely access an application running inside a virtual machine in the cloud, wealth managers can now deliver a higher level of service in their clients’ homes with the convenience and productivity of an iPad.”

Want to learn more about cloud communications? Then be sure to attend the Cloud Communications Expo, collocated with ITEXPO West 2012 taking place Oct 2-5, in Austin, TX. The Cloud Communications Expo will address the growing need of businesses to integrate and leverage cloud based communications applications, process enhancement techniques, and network based communications interfaces and architectures. For more information on registering for the Cloud Communications Expo click here.

Stay in touch with everything happening at Cloud Communications Expo. Follow us on Twitter.

 

 


Edited by Jamie Epstein

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