| | November 20169CIOReviewall-time high. Cloud service providers can provide a meaningful solution to the security problem, due to their scale and ability to make substantial investments in people, process and technology.Another common challenge we observe is a lack of in-house cloud architecture and cloud operations expertise. Businesses need to understand how they will get their existing workloads to the cloud, and what their long-term operating model will be once they go into production. For companies who are considering making this shift for portfolios of thousands of applications, these questions are far from trivial. When you layer on hybrid deployments across multiple different operating models (cloud, dedicated servers, on-premise, off-premise), it quickly becomes clear that teams of cloud experts are required. Cloud service providers would be wise to consider this expertise gap, and build meaningful solutions to help businesses overcome it.The Changing Role of CIOsThe rise of cloud computing has had a significant impact on how individual business units within the enterprise consume IT. The `shadow IT' issue ­the enterprise provisioning and deploying cloud applications outside of the scope of corporate IT -opens up businesses to a myriad of problems. For starters, these applications have the potential to disrupt information security, reliability of business operations, corporate governance, and financial control. It is most often the CIO who is held responsible for any negative outcomes and the first to get the call when something goes wrong. In addition to managing security risks and reducing costs, CIOs are also being asked to provide a host of new services, such as access to on-demand infrastructure and turnkey developer environments. These capabilities objectively increase the app development agility of the enterprise ­ but also pose entirely new challenges that CIOs have never faced. In this new world, CIOs have the opportunity to transform the value of their role from just the `keeper of the technology' into a true information leader who enables the enterprise to deliver apps with greater pace and quality than ever before. Meeting the Diverse NeedsCloud fundamentally alters what is possible with IT, and enables companies to reimagine what types of solutions they can bring to their customers. Cloud isn't the end game by itself.Alongside existing technologies, cloud is quickly becoming a fundamental pillar of the foundation that enables businesses to solve their IT challenges. The ability to quickly gain access to massive amounts of computing power without incurring the extended timelines or massive capital expense of building data centers is a game changer. Through adding cloud infrastructure to their set of available IT solutions, enterprises have the ability to choose the deployment model that meets their highly diverse needs, today and into the future.Taking the Right StepsCreate and foster an environment of innovation amongst your development teams ­ encourage and enable them to experiment with the latest advancements in IT. The reality is that your best developers will already be doing this. By creating a partnership with your developers that encourages experimentation with what's coming next in IT, you will have a better understanding of not only what technologies your developers have a preference for, but also in avoiding `shadow IT' problems.Many IT decision makers are in the unenviable position of needing both to provide for the day to day as well as having clarity on where their business is heading in the future. This creates a fantastic opportunity for information sharing between businesses who are facing the same types of challenges. Prominent technology conferences can serve as potential opportunities to become acquainted with like-minded business leaders and leverage the collective wisdom of the group to ensure that you stay ahead of the technology curve! Tom BressieCloud fundamentally alters what is possible with IT, and enables companies to reimagine what types of solutions they can bring to their customers
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