The Promise and Perils of Cloud Computing

Like most things in life cloud computing is a double-edged sword. It can either eliminate internal IT or be used by IT to drive business innovation.

Speaking at the IBM Pulse2012 conference today, Danny Sabbah, general manager for IBM Tivoli, strongly urged IT organizations to be a lot more proactive about pursuing the latter path. Clearly, many line-of-business executives are taking advantage of cloud computing to sidestep IT. What internal IT organizations need to do in order to make it less appealing for business executives to go around IT is to simplify, standardize and then automate their IT environments.

According to Sabbah, it’s all the complexity within IT environments today that is making it hard for IT organizations to dynamically respond to the needs of the business. Instead of relying on a “tools du jour” strategy, Sabbah says that IT organizations need to implement cloud computing in a way that accelerates business innovation or you risk being bypassed all together.

Sabbah says that cloud computing done right should make the business more resilient to rapidly changing business conditions, while at the same time providing more choice and flexibility across a hybrid cloud computing environment. Furthermore, Sabbah says that those cloud computing platforms should not only be application workload-aware, but also come with built-in security and analytics capabilities.

As IT has become more complex, the business has actually become more susceptible to disruptions because of any number of IT issues, adds Sabbah. Not only has the rise of mobile computing exponentially increased the number of end points that need to be managed, Sabbah says there are roughly 13 billion security events a day that need to be analyzed. And as physical systems become more instrumented, the amount of data that needs to be managed is increasing at rates that no IT organization can keep pace with.

None of these issues are ever going to go away. IT leaders need to figure out how emerging technologies will ultimately better serve the needs of the business. Otherwise, it’s only a matter of time before somebody else, for better or worse, makes that decision for them.