Is Your Company Cloud Ready? 10 Factors for CIOs to Consider

Grazed from Huffinton Post.  Author: Vala Afshar.

In a recently Harvard Business Review blog, a two-year research study with the Harvard Business Review, The Economist, Corporate Executive Board, Intel and others suggested that CIOs are not in sync with what the CEO and the other line-of-business executives need from IT. One out of two CEOs said that IT should be commodity service purchased as needed and only a quarter of executives felt that the CIO is performing above their peers. The research clearly pointed to the failure of IT to deliver value to the business in terms of accelerating growth, reducing customer acquisition costs and improving customer retention.

I also recently spoke with MIT Sloan Management Review about the emergence of the chief digital officer in the enterprise. I noted that digital technologies — cloud, mobile, social, applications, big data — in the enterprise is shifting some of the technology procurement, development and implementation responsibilities away from the CIO, and to new positions within the enterprise including: the chief digital officer, chief data officer, or into marketing with oversight from the chief marketing officer. Gartner is predicting that by 2015, 25% of the enterprise will appoint a chief digital officer…

One technology that promises to help improve IT efficiency and enable the CIO and her staff to be more strategically focused is cloud computing. Cloud promises to help with changing the way IT is acquired and allowing IT to focus on more value added projects. But not all companies are ready for the cloud. I spoke to Richard Casselberry, director of IT operations for Enterasys, who manages 30+ enterprise cloud applications across the globe, servicing 1,000 employees in 30 offices. Casselberry has developed a cloud readiness checklist based on his experience of building a hybrid network infrastructure…

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