Mobility, consumerization and security could drive customers toward a cloud delivery platform.

It's clear to IT professionals that the status quo approach to delivering IT services to the business won't withstand the technological, cultural and economic pressures of today's barrage of consumer technologies, mobile applications and cloud services. What's not always clear is how to transform the current operations to sustain a more agile environment that pulls resources together on-the-fly to meet customer demand.

"With mobility, consumerization and cloud, the rulebook of how we deliver IT is being ripped up. And one of the biggest impacts is on security," says Simon Daykin, CTO of Logicalis UK. Logicalis is an international professional services company that helps customers find the cloud computing solution best suited for their needs, ranging from public, private, shared and hybrid cloud offerings. Daykin says customers are facing a perfect storm of factors pushing them to update their approach to security and IT service delivery, and cloud services could be part of the answer to their problem.

Recent research supports this. CA Technologies poll data reveals that the number one challenge respondents cited with supporting customers with mobile devices is security. Seventy percent said security is the biggest challenge to embrace mobile technologies overall. At the same time, 62% of respondents cited faster time to market and handling peak demand as their number one benefit of cloud, while 38% said they saw lowering IT expense as the biggest benefit to using public cloud.

IT service delivery is critical to any successful business, and the window of opportunity to embrace new technologies and services to enable optimized IT service delivery isn't huge. IT organizations must deal with updated applications to work with myriad mobile devices, end-user demand for consumer-like products and pressure from the business to adopt cloud services because of their reported ease and cost-effectiveness. On top of all this, how IT secures the environment is also changing.

"Mobility is no longer a choice. It is required by everybody within the organization. The traditional perimeters of the organization are being cut. No longer is a firewall around the perimeter of your organization a way to deliver security," Daykin says. "As we mobilize our applications and services, and we use cloud platforms and cloud services rather than delivering everything out to our own data centers, the whole paradigm of how we deliver IT is changing. Consumerization on top of this means people want to consume applications and services in the same way they do at home."

Daykin says Logicalis offers customers integrated management and an ease of use that could help them evolve toward a better means of delivering IT services. The company uses service containers that allow an organization to look through a lens of service rather than view the services based on its infrastructure components. The company's logical containers also allow organizations to abstract their services from the cloud and move them between clouds. He says for customers starting to consider cloud, they should think first of the services they want to deliver.

"If I was starting out as a customer looking at cloud now, I would think very hard about what service I want delivered. Cloud is not about technology. Cloud is about service delivery," Daykin says. "And what customers need to do very early on is think about the way they want to deliver service and then they can find the right cloud platform to suit their needs."

How has cloud computing changed how you deliver IT service to your organization? Please leave a comment here, let me know via Twitter @DDubie or e-mail me directly at Denise.Dubie@ca.com.