It's no secret that the consumerization of IT is defining a new era of corporate computing, bringing with it both business opportunities and technical challenges. A host of technologies-ranging from cloud-computing services, mobile applications, social networks and mobile devices-are being introduced into the enterprise ecosystem by employees, business partners, customers, and corporate executives.
It's also no secret that consumer apps, hardware, communication, and platform technologies are giving people unprecedented flexibility in how, when, and where they do business. They're creating new and better ways for organizations to engage with people and markets, potentially strengthening customer loyalty and boosting revenues.
As the recent IDC-CA Technologies research study, "IT Consumers Transform the Enterprise," found, the business benefits of consumer driven IT include:
- Customer loyalty
- Brand awareness
- Customer feedback
- Expanding markets
- Improved recruitment
- Increased revenue
Any business person would want to jump in immediately to get even a small slice of those benefits, but it's not that easy. With every shift in technology or approach comes new trade-offs, and for consumer driven IT, the cost is myriad new demands on IT departments already stretched to the limit. IT now has to figure out how to support and secure a bumper crop of user-owned smartphones, tablets, and other devices; along with third party mobile, social, and collaborative apps that users embrace, often times going around existing IT policies.
This gives new meaning to the phrase many global IT organizations have been operating under for years: "Do more with less." A lot more. The additional challenges IT departments face, according to the study, include:
Protecting confidential information on multiple devices
- Capacity planning and performance optimization
- Delivering a consistent user experience across multiple devices and browsers
- Ensuring acceptable application response times
- Controlling bandwidth costs
It could be argued that cloud computing is one of, if not "the" key enabler of consumer driven IT. Without the cloud model, everything else driving consumerization breaks down.
Enterprise cloud services let IT departments keep up with computing trends. They create new levels of flexibility, more cost-effectively extending enterprise infrastructure in rapid response to competitive business demands. In doing so, cloud services bring agility to the IT organization and the business as a whole, by:
- Dealing with spikes in service demand
- Improving the user experience
- Speeding time-to-market for new services
There are several business and technical challenges to consider before you can reap these rewards. Step one: to take an inventory of the business services IT currently provides, along with the policies and procedures that accompany those services. Next, roll in the consumer driven services employees, customers, and partners are asking for; and any consumer driven services competitors are hurting you with. Only when you have a good grasp of the current state of affairs and new requirements can you can decide which services are best moved to or supported by the cloud.
Moving certain commoditized application requirements, such as e-mail or basic office productivity apps, to public cloud services can actually cut costs and improve performance. You can deploy new solutions in weeks, not months or years. As part of this, consider the cost required to support applications and services. Is it strategic to keep this expertise in-house? Or could a service provider cover it for you? For commodity applications, turning support over to the service provider frees your IT team to focus on the high value tasks.
The management of service-centric models is another important issue to consider. The IT team needs to have a good handle on the cloud service provider's quality of service, and a means to monitor and manage service delivery. The service levels you need to monitor in a cloud computing environment are no different than those for traditional platforms. They include:
- Performance
- Availability
- Visibility
- Reporting
- Security
- Compliance
Of course, managing these cloud-based services creates some new challenges. In most cases, we were already relying too heavily on faith to ensure that these services are being delivered in accordance with the commitments the cloud providers agreed to in their standard service level agreements (SLAs). Surprisingly, for example, there may not be a monthly performance report, which means we'd have to monitor outages on our own, and the excruciating detail that underpins performance calculations can be difficult to comprehend. The trouble is that we rely on these commodity services that we're sourcing from external providers to support our daily operations - it's another example of a trade-off. In turn, we then need to move beyond the reticence of the cloud service provider to deliver performance information so that we can govern these essential relationships for our organization.
A sound approach is to adopt internal (e.g., private) cloud services as a prototype. Implement the services; establish the benchmarks, best practices, and policies; and then start moving targeted applications to public, private, or hybrid clouds. And since few organizations have in-house cloud computing expertise today, consult your IT vendors and partners and see how they can help you get there quickly. Of course, CA Technologies has a wealth of products, services, and consulting options that can help IT organizations transition to and capitalize on cloud computing, from cloud migration services and turnkey cloud platforms, to project and portfolio management service management and cloud security.