Critical questions executives should ask about cloud computing

Phil Garland

CEO

Cloud signifies an era of computing where flexibility in IT drives business agility and a higher level of innovation and customer engagement.

Critical questions to consider

  • How can I communicate the transformational potential of cloud computing to senior management and the board?
  • What business value does cloud bring beyond the IT benefits and how do I identify and gain those benefits?
  • How can we exploit strategic opportunities while managing risk to the business (finance, tax, operational and IT)?

CFO

Impacting both the top line and the bottom line of the business, cloud fuels new opportunities but also raises new areas of risk that need to be managed. Cloud also shifts spend from capital expenditure to operational, allowing enterprises to make investments closer to the time of actual returns.

Critical questions to consider

  • How do I manage the unpredictability of costs in a pay as you go model?
  • What are the implications of moving to a service model from an accounting and tax perspective?
  • How can IT costs reflect the needs of individual business units?

CIO

An IT environment built with cloud principles — on-demand, elastic and usage-based pricing — delivers value to the end customer by linking the end customer experience to the enabling layers of the IT stack from infrastructure to applications.

Critical questions to consider

  • Which of the strategic imperatives can cloud solutions help right away?
  • What is the roadmap that creates incremental benefits on the way to adopting cloud computing?
  • How can IT better align with product development to support our changing business model?
  • How does your talent strategy need to change to support an evergreen IT infrastructure?