CIOs harnessing and fine-tuning the cloud model — and here’s proof

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Linda Tucci.

The IT press is rife with stories about how cloud computing spells the end of corporate IT departments, so for this issue of Modern Infrastructure: CIO Edition, we assigned writer Dina Gerdeman to investigate. In extensive interviews with IT leaders across a swath of industries, Gerdeman discovered that, contrary to the gloomy pronouncements, CIOs and their IT staffs are harnessing the power of cloud computing on two fronts.

They are handing over the hosting and maintenance of non-core business applications to cloud providers in order to free up staff to focus on strategic business projects. And, second, they are adapting the cloud’s most enticing features—its tremendous scalability, shorter time to market for new products, and lower costs—to improve their own internal IT operations. Oh yes, and they are doing so in a metrics-driven, analytical fashion, pushing ahead aggressively when the strategy pans out and recalibrating as they learn what doesn’t work…

For the videogame maker Electronic Arts, for example, a “public cloud-first” approach for non-core apps such as email meant that the IT staff could devote whole days, not just spare minutes, to developing technology strategy that drives business revenue, said former CIO Mark Tonnesen, now a consultant specializing in transformational IT projects. Part of that new focus on IT strategy, by the way, includes assessing when the public cloud is not the right answer for the business. “Amazon becomes like a drug,” Tonnesen told Gerdeman—costly and risky. The sophisticated technology Electronics Arts is using to analyze players’ game behavior to improve its products runs in a new private cloud…

Read more from the source @ http://searchcio.techtarget.com/opinion/CIOs-harnessing-and-fine-tuning-the-cloud-model-and-heres-proof

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