CIOs See Big Cloud Computing Shifts In 2010

Page 1 of 2

CIOs are looking at making major strategic shifts toward the cloud this year as they grapple with continued pressure on IT budgets.

Several IT executives attending the annual North American Conference Wednesday in Boston of the Innovation Value Institute (IVI), an organization aimed at establishing IT investment benchmarks, said they are embracing private and public clouds.

Peter Forte, CIO of Analog Devices, said the electronics manufacturer is moving to the cloud in the wake of a 25 percent IT budget cut last year. Over the last 45 years, he said, Analog simply built up too many resources around maintaining IT infrastructure.

Now, Forte said, Analog is looking at moving applications to the public cloud embracing applications like Salesforce.com and at the same time building an internal private cloud as part of a move toward virtualizing 300 Windows Servers and scores of Unix servers.

"This is a matter of survival," Forte said. "In the last 20 years, I haven't seen this kind of dramatic cost cutting. Luckily, the good news here is technology has evolved to the point where it is helping us make this transition. We would never have been able to make a 25-30 percent budget reduction 10 years ago without an incredible fall off in service."

Forte cautioned that he does not see applications like e-mail or even Microsoft's Office product line as ready to move to the public cloud. Almost to underscore that point, Microsoft revealed last week that customers of its Business Productivity Online Standard Suite may have experienced on January 28 "intermittent access to services."

"We understand that any disruption in service may result in a disruption to your business," said Michael Ziock, senior director, Business Productivity Online Service Operations for The Microsoft Online Services Team in a posting on the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog.

That Microsoft outage underscores the critical service level agreement issue (SLA) that businesses face as they move to the cloud. IT executives at the conference said that is one of the reasons it is critical that companies embrace IVI's IT-CMF (Capability Maturity Framework) as a standard for making IT investment and operating decisions.

The IT-CMF consists of a five-stage maturity model used to organize and structure a framework for mapping IT improvement efforts.

Gregg Wyant, Intel's IT CTO, who spoke at the conference, said the entire industry needs to look at frameworks like IT CMF in order to assure cloud computing is successful. "If you don't have standard business processes or standard ways to outsource some of your IT responsibilities you will never be able to utilize cloud effectively," he said.

Wyant said one of the biggest dangers in moving to the cloud is the lack of industry standards to connect various cloud platforms whether they are public or private. "The catch 22 is there are no inter-structure standards that exist," he said. That means significant integration challenges for companies that want to adopt various cloud offerings. "Those shortcomings need to be addressed by the industry for cloud to be more viable," he said.

Wyant said Intel currently has only about five percent of its IT operations in the cloud in the form of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings. He said because of its scale Intel is unlikely to take more than 10 to 15 percent of its IT operations to external cloud offerings. He said the cloud model is likely to appeal more to small medium busineses (SMBs).

Next: What Impact Will IT Budget Pressure Have On Cloud Decisions?

1 | 2 | Next >>

Tweet

   

More Applications & OS