Shifting Business Priorities and its impact on IT priorities

Technology spending in business is highly dependent on the overall economy, and over the past decade IT executives have faced several major changes in economic conditions within which they have had to plan their annual expenditures.

When it comes to IT priorities, the organizations are very keen to evaluate new technologies and use contemporary technology in an efficient manner. When connected with business priorities, the picture is much clearer.

As of 2014, IT budgets across organizations would like to strike a balanced distribution that rates customer satisfaction almost equally with cost cutting, and also display a renewed emphasis on quality, increasing market share and time to market.

Market Transformation & Evolution of Cloud Computing

In IT, the biggest transformations are around the disruptive emergence of the cloud services model — a model that is both market expanding and challenging. The cloud-driven transformation of the IT market is necessitating the restructuring of vendors’ offerings, market footprints, and business models. It is also driving private data centers to become leaner, meaner and more efficient

The technologies that make cloud possible, is already there for quite some time now. Cloud is not new to consumer software business either. However what is new here are the technologies enabling these cloud capabilities now available to enterprises small and large. Viewed this way cloud is both evolutionary and disruptive. Evolutionary because organizations can try to aggregate their own computational, storage and network needs and use the abstraction provided by virtualization to reap cost, scalability, time-to-market and several other benefits.

Disruptive because cloud opens up the possibility to a lot of great software concepts that remained as mere ideas so far to be realized now as software and disrupt well-entrenched software. There will also be a lot of disruption on how enterprises want to develop new applications and maintain and enhance their existing applications. Infrastructure engineers will advocate IaaS, developers will push the evolution of PaaS, while business-stakeholders might be keen on SaaS. Depending on an organization’s IT culture, its IT portfolio could be a mix of these different cloud delivery models. Disruption can also happen if in the enterprise world – a new application like Facebook becomes the preferred platform to write enterprise or industry specific applications. The possibilities are limitless.

Taken together, this emergence of a highly connected, service centric, mobile, on demand consumer oriented world is beginning to reshape the way that businesses interact with their customers via social media and mobile interfaces as much as it is changing the way providers of many types of products and services differentiate their offerings – using value-add, information rich services and relationships to deliver value and it is providing a wide range of new vectors on which to base new product and service development

Private Cloud

Enterprise private cloud solutions help organizations leverage the existing IT environment and create a cloud-computing platform in the private internal network. This model overcomes several challenges faced in public cloud adoption. Enterprise private clouds are seen as a natural progression of initiatives like virtualization already taken up by several organizations.

Way forward for Cloud Computing

Interest In cloud computing has been spurred by a confluence of changes in the business and information technology landscape. Today, it is generally viewed as a potentially attractive new form of low cost IT outsourcing, and cloud technology providers and users are focused on tackling the many limitations and challenges of cloud computing, especially in serving enterprise scale needs. Looking ahead, it is expected that a series of significant disruptions that will be catalyzed by the evolution of cloud computing will be seen. As a result, all businesses would be well advised to begin to develop experience with cloud computing platforms at an early stage to better prepare themselves for the disruptions that lie ahead.