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Are you moving to an Infrastructure as a Service IT model?
As a CIOs do you need to own the IT estate of your organisation? The current economy and increasing business competition is calling for a new approach to infrastructure decisions, CIOs today find themselves at a junction with regard to how they deploy resources. As organisations change their approach to markets, so CIOs may need to consider re-evaluating their infrastructure directions. Turning towards cloud computing and applications delivered as a service could well be the answer, come and join our CIO debate
Or, if you are involved in the email sector and would like to write an article on the future of email, send your thoughts to Mark Chillingworth, editor of CIO.co.uk at mark_chillingworth@idg.co.uk.
So far in the CIO cloud computing debate the technology has been described as a new form of service-oriented architecture, an alternative to outsourcing and a revolution that CIOs will have to contend with. But what do CIOs think? We took three CIOs from three very different vertical sectors and asked them as part of our interviews whether they felt that the business case for cloud computing was now clear and whether the infrastructure really existed to take the technology on as part of their strategic IT plans.
Our CIOs were Darryn Warner of Balfour Beatty, which describes itself as an infrastructure services company, planning, building and even running the built infrastructure around us, such as roads, public facilities and sports stadiums. Ian Dyson is Director of Trading Group IS for The Cooperative Group, famous for its food stores, funeral care and pharmacy. Paul Brocklehurst is our public sector representative as head of IMT at Surrey County Council.
The public sector view
Paul Brocklehurst, as CIO of Surrey County Council is looking forward to the much discussed government cloud (G-cloud) becoming a reality. He, like almost all public sector CIOs, has to make major savings for the authority he represents and sees a single government cloud initiative as part of the way to achieve those savings.
"The business case is there, we are doing our requirements documents ready," he says before explaining that much of the complexity of government IT and also what has been dubbed waste by politicians, can be eradicated by the G-cloud. He cites the example of social services workers who work in hospitals; in many cases they have a desk with two PC on two different networks. One PC is for their NHS access and systems, another for the social services networks and applications.
"G-cloud will give more standards and platforms to workers. It will also reduce the number of buildings required," he says. Surrey County Council hope to reduce the number of buildings they need to perform their various governing tasks through greater worker flexibility and mobility using the G-cloud.
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