The change with cloud computing is that many of the responsibilities of realizing these conditions are now the responsibility of the provider/vendor, and not of the end customer/IT organization anymore. Compare this with driving your own car or taking a plane. Which option feels the safest? And which one actually is the most safe?
An important implication of this shift of responsibilities is that it also requires a shift of roles and ITIL processes in the IT organization (from operational to tactical processes). This is because the IT organization remains accountable for the secure and performant delivery of the IT services.
From an IT perspective, we can sum up the following advantages:
Of course, these are all very nice to have. But the real advantages of cloud computing come from the business perspective:
For many industries, these are not nice to haves, because this is actually what is expected on IT. As cloud solutions are ubiquitous, those TCO lowering, innovating and business thriving applications will be sourced by the end-users, not seldom without the involvement of the IT department.
And here is the main threat of cloud computing: in the shadow sourcing of cloud services by the end-user community. Shadow sourcing namely adds quite some risks in terms of security, network traffic and costs, data integration, integrity, consistency, etc. And the intrinsic cloud risks and challenges (lock-in, data privacy, service quality) are of course still there, but are now not under the control of the IT department anymore.
Because the IT department has experience with most of the risks concerning cloud computing, they should be involved in the selection of cloud vendors, contract negotiation, migration and integration services, governance, etc.
IT departments should take the lead in the journey to the cloud. Denying cloud computing can have serious implications:
Knowing all this, how can an IT department prepare for the future? This will be the content of our next article on .