Executive Summary
As the global economy emerges out of the Great Recession, CIOs continue to look for ways to meet their corporate mandate: generate more business value for the enterprise with fewer financial and human resources. As a result, they continue to look to cloud computing as a way to meet this mandate – and with good reason. Implementing cloud computing offers many tangible business benefits for corporate IT departments. Yet, despite the frequent, tangible advantages other firms have achieved, many CIOs still find themselves reluctant to adopt cloud computing for their own firms, even as the recovery gains momentum.
As with any emerging technology, successfully implementing cloud computing offers CIOs many rewards. These rewards, however, do not come without risks – both on the business side as well as the IT side. This white paper will help CIOs explore the benefits to be gained from implementing cloud computing in their firms along with the lessons learned from other firms' cloud implementations. The advantage to CIOs will be a clearer picture of the benefits they stand to gain from cloud computing and an easily understandable view of the potential obstacles and how to avoid them to ensure successful cloud implementation.
The Cloud and the CIO
As we move forward into the second decade of the 21st Century, many market trends continue to shape corporate IT departments. The global economic downturn, increased energy and hardware costs, and decreased corporate IT budgets have convinced CIOs of one stark truth: they have neither the bandwidth nor the resources to manage all of their IT efforts in-house.
