Is Cloud the Answer for the CIOs and CFOs?

On top of that, vendors rarely got in front of the CFO and when they did, they talked technology. With cloud computing the conversation is a very different one; it talks about price per compute unit (Gb or Mb), availability and rapid provisioning - a language the CFO understands.

Vendors and service providers are now able to target the CFO directly with promises of computing at a significantly reduced cost, a factor that is driving CIOs to seriously consider researching and investing in cloud computing.

In the past, organisations have had to adopt ‘build just in case’ models for their infrastructures. This is particularly the case in the retail sector, where a significant increase in customers and transactions during short periods throughout the year, such as Christmas, cause huge peaks in demand on the infrastructure.

With the development of cloud computing and in particular IaaS, the concept of ‘pay for what you use’ with the ability to burst during peak periods becomes a reality.

Now, organisations can build applications that support millions of transactions, however, the underlying infrastructure only need handle thousands of transactions until that surge occurs.  When it does occur, the infrastructure will become available. This model presents a very compelling proposition to both the CIO and CFO.

Even if an organisation doesn’t need to build a new data centre, the cost of developing and operating a custom enterprise application is still very high. They generally require a significant amount of time, developers, software licenses, infrastructure, maintenance and support.

On top of the expenditure, businesses still aren’t guaranteed to end up with an application that fulfils the requirements. CIOs are starting to embrace SaaS offerings, such as Salesforce, where the limitations in functionality (if any) are outweighed by the costs being shared across many customers and wrapped up into a simple lower cost ‘pay per user’ model.

In summary, the hype around cloud seems to be justified. The industry is already seeing cloud computing reducing the cost of providing IT services back to the business from both a capital and operational perspective.

It is also about right-sizing the infrastructure for the services being delivered, eliminating unnecessary expenditure. Both are tasks high on the agenda of most CIOs but ones they have struggled to deliver on in recent years.