We once thought of clouds as those objects in the sky that formed to our imagination: swans, dragons and storing life giving water. Now … the cloud [technologies] stores and provides access to our data, to our personal stuff.
Cloud computing has allowed people to try new things, to share information and stories with friends, family and work colleagues; just as PCs did in the early 1990s.
Personal and work lives can truly intersect allowing data from both to be available any where, any time from any device.
Strategies to evolve IT such as grid and utility computing and SOA, for the most part, were and are not focused on people, their data and the activities that lead to their decision making. They are focused on the plumbing of IT. The focus is from IT, on shareable infrastructures and notably cost reduction; not from the consumer (employee, customer) of information.
Information usage has become personal, again
Cloud computing has allowed people to pick and choose the applications – tools – they want to use to manage the activities and outcomes of their work and personal life’s.
There is an immediate need for IT to focus on self-service, on-demand services that provide secure storage and access to data either through the provisioning of private or hybrid cloud ecosystems.
Not providing flexibility of choice or a diverse subscription model company data will continue to migrate – leak – from company IT managed systems to cloud service providers. Data will exfiltrate creating gaps in knowing where company data is located as well as confidentiality and management of that data, and ultimately customer and stakeholder trust.
IT is a broker of information technology
IT will need to evolve in its role as a broker of business solutions that will cross data center boundaries from internal to external information systems.
Not only will IT need to provision and support an ecosystem of systems that are comprised of internal and external system, but also there is a need to integrate external application and cloud service providers with internal system management and logging infrastructures.
A holistic – enterprise – view into the performance and usage of these external systems with internally managed systems will create a view of reliability, confidentiality, integrity and availability metrics. So that the question “Knowing Who accesses What, When, Why and from Where” can be answered appropriately.
Microsoft Hosting, for me, provides good perspectives, guidelines, practices, and capabilities to provide internally hosted on-demand services.
Just like from the initial use of PCs in the early 1990s, companies are not ready to manage the use of cloud based computing services by its employees. This creates gaps, and of course new opportunities, managing availability to information, protection of data from leakage and loss of confidentiality.
A disciplined approach to allow and provision cloud [self service, on-demand] services is required. IT needs to broker these solutions so that there is an assurance of form, function and importantly, fit.
There is a mounting need for IT to quickly provision on-demand services to satisfy business needs which can be subscribed by an individual employee or customer, otherwise gaps in managing data availability, protection and confidentiality will be hampered. If the IT organization cannot meet these needs quickly, then it becomes irrelevant and of little value to its business partners. IT will find and continually find itself outsourced to the SalesForces, the Amazons, the Apples, and the Dropboxes of the world.
As the information technology moniker suggests the IT organization needs to apply a systematic treatment – the execution of its craft – to the management of information under its guardianship.
Intersect of IT 