Cloudy with a Chance of Disruption (Part One)

There are exponential increases in the criticality of business functions which leverage the cloud, the diversity of technology and service delivery models delivering cloud services, and the complexity of management and governance models for cloud services. As cloud services have matured beyond the confines of peripheral and experimental solutions into the core of the enterprise, these enterprises need to integrate cloud into transformation strategies, leverage cloud for enterprise-scale solutions and manage cloud as a strategic imperative.

This new breed of Enterprise Cloud services is already the foundation of enterprise transformation. Whether it can be the catalyst for the next wave of technology-driven innovation depends on how enterprises shape the direction of transformation and harness the power of Enterprise Cloud.

For cloud services to become ubiquitous across enterprises and business functions in the face of these challenges is a testament to the steep change in utility costs that cloud delivers, the acceleration in innovation that cloud enables, and the potential for discontinuous business value that cloud makes possible.

The key trends provide enterprises with a blueprint for effective strategy, architecture, execution, and ongoing management of Enterprise Cloud services. The focus needs to be much less on addressing old arguments against cloud adoption which stopped being relevant 5 years ago, or on experimenting with non-critical services which reached maturity over 3 years ago and much more on ensuring that the rapid adoption of Enterprise Cloud services can be optimized to maximize business value.

Each of the trends has a direct impact on business value potential and specific actions that enterprises need to take to ensure the realization of this value.

Based on the experience of hundreds of major enterprises defining and executing Enterprise Cloud strategies, there are five new realities that all partners in the Enterprise Cloud ecosystems – clients, cloud platforms, integrators, service providers, consultants – need to recognize and address and this paper gives an insight to all this.