Global CIO: 10 Indispensable Insights On Cloud ComputingGlobal CIO: 10 Indispensable Insights On Cloud Computing

6) The Value Of Hybrids. "It's this hybrid of private, on-premises clouds and public clouds—the potential for offloading work during peak activity—that highlights cloud computing's potential value to businesses. . . . The traditional data center could streamline its operations, offloading peaks as a minimal invocation of the public cloud. Small or large businesses might find ways to use the cloud on a more regular basis and avoid building out a data center that tends to get more and more complex in the first place. Let the cloud managers manage complexity. That's what they're good at. The business can then just pay for what it uses, rather than repeatedly overspending on hardware." (From Chapter 5, "The Private Cloud," page 92.)

7) Calming The Doomsday Crowd. "One way to counter the vendor's proprietary interest, however, is for customers to form groups that list their own preferences and use them to serve notice to the vendors. The best form of pressure is a paying customer pointing out the advantage of ease of movement between clouds. If this mobility is granted sooner rather than later, the immense potential of cloud computing can be realized sooner as well, and I doubt that competent vendors would be injured by such a development. User groups often produce spokespersons who are skilled at producing such a message." (From Chapter 6, "Overcoming Resistance to the Cloud," page 119.)

8) New Roles And Priorities For IT. "To move in the right direction, regardless of whether the CEO and other members of top management have set goals and objectives, the IT staff needs to anticipate the change and build up the required skills and practices. It may do this in collaboration with business users in the ranks who need resources and may or may not realize that those resources are available through a cloudlike approach. If the IT staff can position the company for a transition, it will come to be viewed less as an anchor that is dragging against future progress and more as a change agent that is helping the company meet the future." (From Chapter 7, "IT Reorganizes," page 129.)

9) Managing The Security Threat. "But the biggest security danger in the cloud is one that hasn't been recognized yet, at least not publicly, to anyone's knowledge. The virtualization hypervisor is a central piece of software through which virtual machines on a physical server must obtain their hardware services. All communications between virtual machine operating systems and the hardware pass through the hypervisor, and from that vantage point, a skilled agent could discern the activity of each and every virtual machine." (From Chapter 8, "Dangers Abound: Security in the Cloud," page 159.)

10) Your Company, Your Strategy, And Your Cloud. "Management still needs to police excesses, but executives who demote or fire someone for using an hour too much cloud server time will have a bad effect on the general sense of experimentation. The resource has to be treated as generously available to those who have shown that they have a knack for using it, or who merely show the prospect of having the knack. It can't be reserved for a high priesthood, as in the past. Experimenting with cloud resources is going to be necessary for the day when cloud computing is commonplace and your company will need to maintain an environment of constant modeling, experimentation, and trial-and-error test implementations to survive. It will need a staff of computer-literate, or perhaps just cloud-literate, experimenters to do so." (From Chapter 9, "Your Cloud Strategy: What Kind Of Company Do You Want?", pages 166-167.)

I hope this gives you a sense of the powerful ideas and insights contained in Charlie Babcock's important new book, Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution. And if you need one more reason to buy the book, consider Charlie's closing passage:

"This, then, is the cloud revolution: a tenfold gain in economies of scale, a similar multiplier of end users' compute power, and an increase in businesses' ability to relate to customers. It is also a potentially disruptive force that is about to wash through many industry segments. Within the cloud platform lies the ability for newcomers to create level playing fields and ethical transaction exchanges where they will fight for position among established players. Will cloud computing lead to your company's success—or something else? The answer lies in the hands of those who understand this revolution, seize the resource, and go to work with it."

RECOMMENDED READING: Global CIO: Oracle's Larry Ellison Embraces Cloud Computing's 'Idiocy' Global CIO: Will Salesforce.com's Soaring Stock Price Puncture The Cloud? Global CIO: Can Jive Drive Social Business Software? Global CIO: Oracle Layoffs Threaten Larry Ellison's Credibility Global CIO: 10 Reasons CIOs Will Get Fired This Year Global CIO: Google Derangement Syndrome Erupts Worldwide Global CIO: Is Steve Jobs Blowing Smoke About Apple TV? Bob Evans is senior VP and director of information's Global CIO unit.

To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his page.

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or write to Bob at [email protected].