- Today’s business and IT landscape is so complex that for the majority of organizations and people it rather appears as a grey amorphous soup with limited sight. Time has passed where this has been seen as an operating environment where one knows how to navigate through in the best way.
- Surprisingly, this situation is meanwhile so widely accepted that the newest technology hype is called Cloud Computing.
- We agree that businesses depend on sophisticated IT services allowing to dynamically balance computing power and hosting capacity as well as optimizing labor costs. We also agree that Cloud Computing is an excellent concept to participate in scaling and availability effects offered by sharing capacity and skills with a broad community.
- But as always in a hype, the industry only talks about the sunny sides. But clouds also produce shadow on the ground. Moving significant parts of your IT landscape into the cloud is a major strategic change program going far beyond technology. It also requires appropriate coverage of operational topics such as governance, business model, security, legal and compliance right from the beginning. And if clients are dependent on solid suppliers, supplier management, service agreements and data protection, etc. then strategic change planning and implementation become key – but supported by well proven non-cloudy (!) approaches and methods.
- In this sense our new claim “peaking out above the cloud” stands for a balanced, integrative approach to new technologies such as Cloud Computing. We also consider business expectations to have new services available rather yesterday than tomorrow, organizational issues, risks and constraints related to security, legal and compliance appropriately.
