Andy McLoughlin

It can no longer be denied, brushed aside or overlooked: the cloud is here to stay. The security fears, concerns over control and service level agreements are now being addressed and overcome and the cloud has soared up the CIO's priority list. According to IBM's 2011 survey of 3,000 global CIOs, 60 percent of organizations are ready to make the move to cloud computing over the next five years in order to gain a competitive advantage and grow their business. This figure is almost double the number of CIOs who said the same last year. Analyst house Ovum also predicts that business spending on public cloud will hit $66 billion by 2015. What does this leap to the cloud mean for CIOs and IT departments? In short, the role of the IT professional is transforming. Dave Aron, Gartner fellow in the analyst's CIO research group, states: "Globally 67% of the IT budget is spent... (more)