Cloud computing is one of the high tech industry’s most significant and disruptive developments of the past few decades, changing the way organizations build, operate, and consume IT. Businesses are eagerly adopting cloud as a means to make enormous gains in the efficiency and agility of their IT, and to enable aggressive exploration of opportunities to create innovative new services and business models. In a word, cloud computing is transformative.
Visionary CIOs who capitalize on cloud’s enormous potential are unlocking new value for their organizations – and changing perceptions of the CIO’s role in the process, to that of a strategic business enabler.
But adopting a cloud computing model is not just about investing in new technology. To fully capitalize on cloud computing requires CIOs to re-engineer their organization’s business processes, re-think the roles and skills of their people, and re-imagine what’s possible when the constraints of traditional IT are removed and businesses achieve true technical agility.
Our work with a company in the financial services sector illustrates how one visionary CIO fully leveraged cloud computing’s potential. Our customer recognized that compelling new mobile financial applications were coming to market and attracting interest from consumers – including many of its own. In order to capture and retain these customers and remain in step with consumer demand, they needed to quickly develop and launch their own mobile payments offering.
Without the agility of a cloud-based architecture, such an innovation could have taken a year or more just to go from concept to beta. But today, operating under an IT as a Service (ITaaS) model, even a large company with complex IT infrastructure can quickly respond to shifts in market demand.
In this case, EMC Global Services engaged with the customer to create and deploy a new mobile payments application that leapfrogged this particular financial services company into a leadership position in a matter of months – a case study in accelerated IT transformation. Our collaboration included strategy and business case development, application architecture and development, infrastructure design and deployment, and operations management support.
This expertise (available through EMC’s Cloud Services portfolio) is being used by CIOs and their organizations across a wide range of industries to enable IT to become a powerful business enabler. In health sciences, Cloud Services are transforming research by providing a platform for collaborative tools and applications. Telecommunications companies are using Cloud Services to effect the rapid deployment and provisioning of new, high-demand services. New media organizations are using Cloud Services to more efficiently deliver products and services across multiple properties and platforms.
For these and many other organizations, cloud computing is providing an unparalleled opportunity to improve IT’s efficiency and agility. With the capabilities and expertise we have gained over the past couple of years, we are able to accelerate the transformation of IT and help CIOs achieve the visions they have for their organizations to excel in their respective industries.
