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 keeping the lights on, 19% supports growth of current business such as scaling up volume or helping the business enter new markets, only 14% is allocated to genuine transformational IT."

With cloud computing placing IT maintenance, support, and updates firmly in the hands of the cloud supplier, the majority of what IT's time and budget is being spent on is being removed. With "keeping the lights on" no longer their concern, it's easy to understand why IT leaders and departments feel threatened. With the consumerization of IT and frustrations with complex, legacy ICT systems, such as SharePoint, driving business teams to buy tools and applications that "just work," IT professionals may also feel they are being pushed out of technology purchasing decisions.

However, the cloud actually presents IT leaders with the ideal opportunity to position themselves as strategists and innovators. For years, the IT department has been the on-call helpdesk and soundboard for businesses' technology woes. If the email system goes down, call IT. If you need to have access to the latest software, call IT. If you want to get your laptop, cellphone or tablet access to the VPN, call IT. With the cloud, a lot of the tactical helpdesk support issues are no longer the IT department's headache and it has the chance to no longer be seen as a technical support function.

The focus for IT should no longer be on the technology itself, but on the business and its information. IT leaders now need to evolve and lead the business they are working for. Freed from the shackles of mundane tasks, CIOs now have the opportunity to step back and think more like a CEO. They can start to examine where they can drive revenue and reduce costs. How can current technologies be optimized to benefit the organization? What technologies can de-deployed to help the business meet its objectives and drive growth? What technology is going to give the business a competitive advantage? What products can the company build to boost sales? These are the kind of questions that IT leaders can now spend time answering and they have a real opportunity to add value to the company's bottom line.

One of the areas that the IT department is already moving into is product development. According to Forrester analyst Khalid Klark: "CIOs will be expected to contribute to developing new revenue streams and improving existing ones. Technology will also be used increasingly to engage and reach the customers more effectively."

Aas well as choosing the right technologies for their own business, CIOs and the IT department will also be deciding what products to build for their customers. A good example of this is mobile apps. Gambling firm Betfair successfully increased sales via mobile app by almost 90 percent during its 2011 financial year. Seen as a vital channel for the business, development of mobile apps was supported by leaders across the company - both IT and business - and was developed by an in-house team.

In addition to mobile apps and new business products, "big data" is another area where IT leaders have the opportunity to shine. With the growth of Web 2.0 technologies, the business world is seeing an explosion of data. Organizations are generating so much data they are unable to manage it effectively, requiring additional tools to capture, manage, analyze and process information. Data is now being stored not only on servers, but PCs, smartphones and tablets to name just a few of the multitude of devices. According to the IDC Digital Universe Study 2010, sponsored by EMC, global digital content created will increase 44-fold by 2020 to 35 zettabytes. This wealth of data impacts an entire organization and the CIO now has the opportunity to capitalize on this and establish how to monetize this data.

With a multitude of devices now penetrating the workplace, CIOs also have the opportunity to establish effective mobile device strategies. It's now not only graduates and the younger members of the workforce who are bringing their smartphones and tablets into the office environment - CEOs and the senior management team are more than likely to pull out their tablet of choice in a meeting. Finally, there is the app issue. Corporate IT today needs to get to grips with apps that teams are using on their devices and not just the devices themselves.

In fact, for today's IT department, the sky really is the limit. IT professionals now have the opportunity to reshape their companies and lead them. They can drive product innovation, suggest applications to build, establish how the wealth of data now available to their business can be monetized and determine which devices are best for their workforce. Surely that is far more appealing than determining why the email client has gone down?