Your company’s cloud strategy must come from the top
March 8, 2013
Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.
SaaS adoption came from the bottom up. Salespeople within enterprises needed a useful CRM system, and instead of begging IT, they used their own credit cards to purchase a Salesforce.com subscription. Eventually, IT figured out Salesforce.com was pervasive in the enterprise and took over the implementation, settling on the strategy by default.
These days it’s the same story around cloud-based file sharing, email, office automation applications, and even larger-scale options such as mass storage and compute services from IaaS and PaaS providers. We seem to be OK with users and developers figuring out the cloud, then IT coming in and making sense of the arrangements…
However, in the case of cloud computing, that’s not the optimal approach. In the last 10 years, it became OK to take a wait-and-see attitude regarding the strategic use of technology, such as cloud computing. This will lead many enterprises down the wrong path; perhaps they have done so already. My message to IT shops is to step up. Define, refine, understand, and publicize your cloud strategy, then implement your plans in small phases. IT should drive any technological shift from the top down. Moreover, in doing so, IT should make sure it understands user and development requirements as related to the company strategy…
Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/your-companys-cloud-strategy-must-come-the-top-213828