Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 28 | Page 79

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// t TECH cht TALK lk that inadvertently, you are defining what doesn’t go across to the cloud. Greater alignment between IT and business units This still needs to be top of the agenda. Leaders need to make better business decisions about data storage, especially where demand for ‘always on’ service delivery is high. Jon Nicholas, Cloud and Storage Infrastructure Manager at Pulsant, said: “As the business grows, we expect to be given targets of our own within the IT team in order to maintain a system that enables the company to do more and offer more. Part of this will include looking at how we can do more with the leading-edge technologies already in place.” Choosing between on-premises and public clouds should not be driven by hype, but rather what will enable the business www.intelligentcio.com “ CHOOSING BETWEEN ON- PREMISES AND PUBLIC CLOUDS SHOULD NOT BE DRIVEN BY HYPE. units at a cost point that is acceptable for the long-term viability of the business and after examining the choices between funding alternatives (CapEx vs OpEx, pay- per-use, etc.) One thing that made the decision a bit easier for IT leaders last year was the introduction of pay-as-you-grow business models for private clouds. However, these usually came as OpEx only, so this just replaces one problem (time to market) with another (increase in cost). This year, we will see more customers asking their vendors for CapEx-based pay-as-you- grow solutions, and these will solve this issue, leaving only the agility challenge. To solve the agility challenge, we will need to change the way customers interact with the vendors they rely on to power their private cloud. We will need to see customers not only asking their vendors if they support the right type of API for automation but rather asking them to be enablers for IT transformation, bringing enterprise grade tools that deliver DevOps like agility without the need for each customer to develop these capabilities themselves. In this new era, customers will choose the technology not only by performance and cost etc, but also by what changes the technology allows them to make in their private cloud to better align it to the new needs of the BUs. n INTELLIGENTCIO 79