cover story
Cloud in 2012
SOCIAL MEDIA
MANAGING MOBILITY
Cloud The
Transforms Business
GREEN It
DATA STORAGE
Cloud is not the future — it’s now. It’s an enabling force for business evolution, allowing organisations to more efficiently re-engineer the company’s corporate strategy. For transformative power, the new model is blue — as in ‘sky’ Mark A Goodburn and Steve Hill
T
he cloud has reached an important inflection point that is impacting corporate strategy and changing business models. Organisations that recognise and are able to effectively manage risks around cloud will create a sustainable competitive advantage. Years of technological advances have allowed the internet to become a viable backbone for ‘virtualized’ technology. The information technology community is well aware of this shift and has largely driven the discussion about cloud and its impact on IT.
Less prevalent has been discussion about the much broader impact cloud is beginning to have on business. Make no mistake about it, with the virtualisation of technology comes the virtualisation of business applications, processes and services. In effect, it means the virtualisation of an organisation. This shift is profound and is poised to have a transformational impact on business models and core drivers of competitive differentiation. The cloud allows large organisations to move away from managing their own data centres to focussing their attention and their resources — financial and
human — on their core competencies. Smaller players see the dynamic implications of a future unrestrained by the need to build extensive IT infrastructure. Cloud is bringing about transformational change in value chains, enabling companies to respond much more effectively to customer demand. Cloud networks are evolving, linking companies through complex, multiparty processes into single, virtual organisations. As with any transformational shift, technical and operational hurdles need to be overcome. Data security, privacy and a host of other issues must be fully considered, and the right balance between these january 2012
CFO india
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