This is partly driven be the rise in what can loosely be described as ‘self service’. What I mean by that is today’s user increasingly expects the same level of control over their IT environment at work as they do at home. Information, applications and analytics are increasingly being delivered through tailored portals that in many ways mirror the social media aggregator sites – bringing everything together in one place.
Users expect to be able to update, change and configure these portals in real time and demand scale and performance that mirrors that of the internet. This then requires a background IT infrastructure and application architecture that is flexible to expand and contract as and when required. Not only that but it has to be manageable and secure.
Take for example a fictional sales director – let’s call him Dan. He spends 70 per cent of his working life on the move. He never goes anywhere without his laptop and his Smartphone and increasingly he expects to be able to access what he wants through either device.
In any given day he will be accessing email, opening, reviewing and editing all sorts of documents, inputting expenses, updating the sales tracker as well accessing different social media apps and showing demos and presentations via tools such as WebEx. What he doesn’t want is to have to go into each separate service independently each time he uses it. He wants it all in one place, one single window which provides what he wants, when he needs it.
Look at today’s successful businesses and you might have 50 or 5,000 people all wanting their own, personally configured window. They will expect to be able to add and remove services whenever they want and they don’t want to have to send an email to India and then wait five weeks in order to do it. Delivering this sort of service is not about outsourcing. No company in its right mind would expect to be able to outsource this lock, stock and barrel and get either the service they want or the price they can afford. And who would want to? If a CIO gives up control of something this critical then pretty soon they will be looking at their own version of the BP oil slick.
This is where the more sophisticated cloud models come into play. A mixture of internal control with the flexibility and functionality provided by the cloud. A scalable infrastructure that can expand and contract according to your needs, web based applications that can respond in real time and customisable portals designed for user control. Cloud is not about outsourcing. It’s about clever sourcing.
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