START Small, Grow Tall: Why Cloud Now

The cloud is the hottest thing in computing today, and enterprises are eagerly seeking to adopt it. They realize that the cloud is the hottest thing in computing today, and enterprises are eagerly seeking to adopt it. They realize that cloud computing holds the promise of curing today’s “data center sprawl,” with its colossal complexity, considerable costs, and substantial capital investment. For their part, service providers see the cloud as a catalyst for revenue growth. Executives and leaders look forward to the day when information technology will be delivered as a pure service throughout the organization—metered, ubiquitous, and available on demand much like electricity or water.

But the reality is that the cloud isn’t yet so mature or capable that it’s ready to replace traditional IT. Companies face a number of obstacles to cloud adoption. Among them: differences between business and IT executives about the pace of adoption; differing stages of maturity within the cloud adoption continuum; and the need to avoid compromising the cloud’s benefits with scattershot, uncoordinated adoption. As you’ll see, without a proper goal and a clear plan to get there, organizations risk re-infecting their IT environments with complexity and sprawl that are every bit as counterproductive as the data center problems the cloud was meant to correct.

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