“Business leaders should take action to reduce the risk of shadow IT replacing approved IT in the organisation.”
From a New Zealand perspective, there is also a growing interest in Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings.
“Many companies are starting to use PaaS to build services and solutions which let their customers use the right tools and technology to rapidly create and deploy custom applications and services, and to improve the delivery of applications to internal and external users in areas such as mobile access and usability,” Wilson adds.
Open source on the rise
Open source also plays a significant role in cloud strategy and architecture, with survey respondents clearly understanding the benefits offered by open source technologies.
The biggest benefit, cited by 29.3 percent of respondents, was open source’s interoperability with existing infrastructure, followed by architecture flexibility (28 percent).
Open source is already the foundation for many popular cloud services and enterprise applications and these responses reflect the general trend towards open source in many aspects of the IT industry.
According to McLaren, the right cloud choices can lead to improved business efficiency and agility allowing CIOs yo improve their organisation’s competitiveness, flexibility and IT economics for the next decade or more by making the right choices when starting their cloud journey.
“Most organisations seem to understand that the cloud can help them achieve strategic goals around improving overall business efficiency and agility, but to take advantage of cloud in the next few years, these organisations will need to ramp up their planning and improve their internal communication about cloud,” he says.
“An effective cloud strategy can transform the IT department from a break-fix and maintenance provider to a driver of innovation, and help internal teams improve efficiency and productivity.
“Resources used previously to simply maintain operations can now be channelled to better respond to market changes and business opportunities.”