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Douglas Neal and Donal O’Shea will report on the recent Leading Edge Forum Study Tour to Seattle and San Francisco, United States to investigate The Consumerization of Enterprise IT – Choices and Risks in Moving to the Cloud.
Consumerized services, available to anyone, delivered from ‘the cloud’, have become widely discussed as Cloud Computing. While millions of people and thousands of businesses are already using Cloud Computing – whether they know it or not – it is early days with the technologies that are being deployed. Enterprises need to understand exactly what is meant by ‘Cloud Computing’ as every vendor tries to turn the phrase to their advantage. Having developed a clear understanding of what Cloud Computing is and can be, each enterprise must explore the extent to which the approach is applicable to them.
The Study Tour enabled 45 motivated IT executives to do exactly that. We visited a dozen companies from the largest in the business to those just emerging from stealth mode. We heard them explain their definition and use of the Cloud. We then discussed among ourselves how we saw their story fitting into the bigger map. We didn’t arrive at all the answers but we did come to understand the important questions which must be answered. Some were:
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Is Cloud Computing real? If so, what parts of it could we consider using in our firms now?
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Which cloud-based services do we use: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – or all three?
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When we go to a cloud vendor, how do we understand the full system price?
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Is the security story around Cloud Computing watertight? Or is there one at all?
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How much security is enough?
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How do we integrate local and remote systems?
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How do we avoid vendor lock-in and obtain portability?
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Should we insist on written service level agreements, or is a good track record more important?
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What kind of performance do we really need?
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How can we identify and then mitigate risks?
Longer term, it certainly looks like the intersection of the Cloud, consumerization, collaboration, and computing anywhere will become the nexus where increasingly business will take place.
In this web conference, we will report on what we heard and what we discussed. We will also tell you how the Leading Edge Forum intends to continue this journey of helping our clients identify and address the issues as this transformational IT technology moves forward.
Who should attend?
Senior Business and IT Executives.