I was recently asked how my perception of the cloud has changed over the past five years. It was interesting to think about because a lot has happened in a short amount of time.
Five years ago I remember thinking the cloud was a future opportunity for us at Red Hat. At the time, we didn’t really have cloud services in production other than Software-as-a-Service applications like Salesforce.com. How quickly things change. Today, we’re using not only SaaS applications, but also Platform-as-a-Service and, increasingly, Infrastructure-as-a-Service to deliver mission-critical, mainstream applications.
Over the past five years we've evolved from thinking, “It’s going to happen sooner or later,” to the cloud now being mainstream for us. But it’s not mainstream for every organization yet; in fact, many have a long way to go.
But, even those firms that think they’re not yet in the cloud are probably kidding themselves. Their marketing departments are analyzing data in the cloud. Their end users are using Box.com, Dropbox, and productivity tools like Evernote in the cloud. Their teams are collaborating on Google documents in the cloud. So while some CIOs may think their organizations aren’t in the cloud, the reality is they’re probably there a lot more than they realize.
It’s pretty clear we’re all headed toward the cloud. So for firms that haven’t yet fully embraced the move, there are some basic steps you can begin taking so you can take advantage of emerging cloud technologies, allowing your IT organization to become more efficient and freeing up budget and resources to work on real business problems.
Here are three...
1. Develop some business expertise and experience in IT. From a staffing standpoint, you need to start thinking about how you’re going to evolve your skills and capabilities over time from operating the network and systems and managing the storage and other production tasks to understanding the business, bringing solutions to the business, and thinking on a broad scale. You’re still going to need to perform some operational tasks, but you may increasingly shift repetitive and well-understood tasks off to vendor partners.
At the same time, start identifying ways to incent, encourage, and train your folks. Support them as they start to make the journey from focusing on low-level details to helping solve business problems.
2. Understand how your business processes might be implemented in a cloud situation. Look at the cloud as an opportunity to shed non-core business functions, whether that’s running your email, phone, or call management systems or perhaps your business social tools. For most businesses, those are necessary functions that have to run right, but IT doesn’t add any particular value by running them in-house.
Our experience is that you can actually start to shift some of those functions to the cloud, typically gaining reliability benefits and cost benefits, and thereby freeing up funding to enable you to work more closely with your business partners.
3. Identify where the cloud is already being used in your organization. Many firms are already starting to see personal productivity and/or data analytic applications move outside their organization to external clouds. The trouble is, the business might not be telling IT about it. This presents security, efficiency, and collaboration challenges.
But by finding out who is using what, your IT organization can start owning the situation and pulling it together so that you don’t run into a situation where, for example, marketing can’t talk to HR because they’re on different cloud solutions.
We’re hitting an inflection point where you are going to be moving from traditional IT environments to cloud-based environments. Preparing your organization to manage some pretty dramatic changes is going to be important. But you will be doing yourself, your team and your enterprise a disservice if you don’t start thinking about starting your journey to the cloud now.
Lee Congdon is CIO of Red Hat. His role includes enabling Red Hat’s business through services, such as knowledge management, technology innovation, technology-enabled collaboration, and process improvement.
