The Hub Commentary_

Well written piece and what this leads me to is that as services require updates or new service development begins in businesses, services will be evaluated as to the best deployment option.  Those options may be to subscribe to a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) provider for the full application and infrastructure with the low hanging fruit being commodity processes like:  IT Service Desk, HR , Collaboration, etc.  Another might be IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) to add capacity on demand, to run workloads for a given service in it’s entirety or maybe merely as infrastructure for the development organization.

Just because something can run in the cloud, doesn’t dictate that it should.  What I disagree with in the article is the heading and statement that “cloud allows IT decision makers to drive business strategy”.  IT must be driving value into the business strategy regardless of deployment option and communicating service performance and cloud computing or any other technology is not the answer that drives that behavior.

Cloud computing must be embraced, evaluated and deployed strategically – Cloud will not drive business strategy – Cloud is a tool that will enable agility in business strategy.

Michele

___________________

Cloud computing may be defined as location independent computing whereby shared servers — for the purposes of this article, external to the enterprise — provide resources, software, and data to computers and other devices on demand. Cloud computing may have started out as an emerging trend that only IT professionals could get excited about (or fear), but it has quickly become one of the most important paradigm shifts in business today.  (Read Full Article…)