Guy Bunker's Blog

In the last couple of weeks of 2008, IT departments and CIOs need to think carefully about the cloud and how it can be used within their organizations - ahead of the business units. Develop, distribute and educate staff on policies around Information Protection and data loss prevention. Put a process together to rapidly respond to requests for new services which live in the cloud.

We live in uncertain economic times where money is tough… but the cloud and more importantly, services within the cloud appears to offer value for money. You pay for what you use and so on. But… will this lead to chaos?

A decade or so ago the likes of PC World started to make a big impact on business computing. You could nip down there in the lunch break and buy a wireless router or a printer, pop back to the office and have it all connected up to the corporate network. Hurray. Well, not actually because the IT department eventually got wind of it, OK so it took several years, and decided that IT equipment in the office should be owned and managed by them in order to reduce the management cost, complexity and risk. So, the rogue wireless hubs slowly disappeared (some too slowly as the war driving and data loss incidents have shown) but they went.

Move on to 2009… budgets are tough but businesses still want to deliver new services. Will ‘the cloud’ become the next PC World equivalent, people rushing out to buy services outside of the IT department? As with ten years ago, all appears to be fine while it works - but when it doesn’t, what then? Even when it is working, the service acquired might not be up to scratch with corporate policy when it comes to having data outside the organization.

So… in the last couple of weeks of 2008, IT departments and CIOs need to think carefully about the cloud and how it can be used within their organizations - ahead of the business units. Develop, distribute and educate staff on policies around Information Protection and data loss prevention. Put a process together to rapidly respond to requests for new services which live in the cloud. There is still time to avoid the chaos… and use the cloud to business advantage.