Fabio Violante

The rising adoption of cloud computing in the enterprise means the role of CIOs will become more relevant to an organisation as they become cloud service brokers and deliverers of technology.

This is the view of Fabio Violante, CTO of EMEA for BMC Software, who spoke during BMC Day, hosted in partnership with ITWeb, at The Forum, in Bryanston.

“2012 is going to be a challenging year from an economic and technology perspective. Our role as IT leaders will change, yet these challenges bring huge opportunities in cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) as a new way of delivering IT and services.”

He pointed to tech giants Facebook and Google and how they have changed their business models to deploy and deliver applications in the cloud, while encouraging collaboration between developers and end-users.

Angus Peacock

According to Violante, 40% of an organisation’s applications portfolio will be delivered through SaaS; however, this does not come without challenges.

“Being able to govern these applications and ensuring continuous compliance with policies and regulations will become more important to CIOs. It’s important to understand how much a service is costing the enterprise when it’s on-premise versus if it’s hosted outside of the organisation.”

Quoting Gartner, he added that the CIO must create a catalogue of internal and external services and ensure a hybrid service capability. In addition, he advised CIOs to deploy user-centric management to create personalised views for the end-user, in order to drive a seamless experience in a multi-source environment.

According to Gartner’s latest CIO report, analytics and BI is the number one CIO technology priority this year, while mobility ranks second. Violante added: “Today, the idea of understanding and leveraging information about the internal and external customer is a very high priority for enterprises.”

Also speaking at BMC Day, Angus Peacock, senior software consultant at BMC, offered some practical tips for entering the cloud.

He said organisations must build cloud solutions that are tailored to their needs. Keeping fl exibility, sophistication, control and resource management in mind can facilitate this.

Cloud computing must have a flexible approach, he noted, as this will support a broad range of user needs across heterogeneous environments. Flexibility also allows cloud users to choose what services they want; however, admin decides what’s available, Peacock explained.

When considering sophistication of the cloud solution, questions relating to how to address the increasing demand for complex cloud services, such as multi-tier apps, need to be asked, he said.

In terms of control, important questions about how control is maintained as the organisation’s cloud grows should be asked, Peacock explained, while for resource management, concerns around how organisations automate intelligent, policy-driven placement and resource management must be raised to decide how to position cloud services.

He further noted that, for the actual cloud solution, the design should be open and heterogeneous, and should use an integrated operating model in order to work with what’s currently in use.

Peacock compared building a cloud solution to building a house; a ‘blueprint’ is needed for building a home and the same approach should be used when building a cloud solution, as it simplifies the creation and maintenance of services.

It is important to examine cloud governance, as this helps make decisions based on the organisation’s policies and helps determine where services should be allocated, Peacock said. This may also be outsourced to a third party.