IT organizations becoming cloud providers: IDC survey
Summary: New IDC survey finds many IT executives agreeing that corporate IT departments are evolving into that of cloud providers.
More evidence of the blurring roles between IT service providers and consumers:
According to results of an IDC/IDG Enterprise survey announced at the Cloud Leadership Forum this week, 72% of the 225 IT executives surveyed say they believed that by 2014, a third of all IT organizations will be providers of cloud services to customers or business partners.
Many companies -- especially those with substantial IT assets -- see themselves as assuming the role of cloud providers. Many non-IT companies may be evolving into cloud service providers as part of their core businesses.
Julie Bort of Network World also surfaced the finding that most IT managers do not fear the cloud at all. When asked if they agreed or disagreed with the statement that "75% of IT jobs will no longer exist as currently defined by 2015," 64% disagreed, while only 20% agreed, the rest were unsure. A majority, 52%, also disagreed with the statement that IT will have to go through a painful restructuring to move to the cloud.
Vendors may have more to fear, however. As IDC relates it: "nearly two-thirds of those surveyed agreeing that several IT vendors will stumble badly in the transition to the cloud over the next three years, putting them at risk of becoming the next Wang or DEC."
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Talkback
RE: IT organizations becoming cloud providers: IDC survey
Mainframe IT departments were the first local cloud. All of your data and apps in their mainframe and nothing under your control. This was the reason PCs came about.
Now flash forward a few decades and we have exactly the same deal being pushed. All your eggs in someone else's basket. However, unlike your mainframe IT department where you may have had some influence over IT or at least a chain of command, you are now just another customer on the web.
Sure the UI may be different, and cloud apps are markedly slower than mainframes with dumb terminals, but it's still the same old thing. It's just that now the techs won't talk to you at all, they converted the mainframe to a data centre on the other side of the planet and you are forced to do everything through a browser.
Isn't progress wonderful ;-)
RE: IT organizations becoming cloud providers: IDC survey
Yep. Truly wonderful.
We even use terminals here. Of our 40 or so employees, 4 have laptops, the rest use Terminals and RDP.
For the IT department, it makes things a lot easier and lets them concentrate on their real work - servicing our customers. They don't have to worry about harddisk crashes on machines that aren't backed up. Everything is backed up automatically.
That said, I still wouldn't trust my company's data to a cloud provider.
I'm a believer in P.I.E. clouding - Pre-Internet Encryption. I'll use the cloud to backup my data and sync it between various machines, but the data that isn't to be shared publicly is encrypted before it gets copied into the cloud.
Given the Lulz and Dropboxes of this world, I really don't have much faith in the Cloud, yet...
RE: IT organizations becoming cloud providers: IDC survey
RE: IT organizations becoming cloud providers: IDC survey