What CIOs Need to Know About Cloud Integration
Cloud computing promises the ability to move applications and systems to the location and platform that makes the most sense–in terms of risk and economics–at any given time.
Retailers, for example, can buy extra transaction-processing capacity during holiday shopping season and give it up when sales ebb. Financial services companies might buy infrastructure in which to test systems to support new products, then walk away from it when development is done. One cloud vendor may offer a better deal than another, prompting CIOs to switch providers.
And as cloud computing evolves, some corporate IT systems will continue to reside in your data center, some perhaps with outsourcers and others with one or more cloud vendors. You will have to manage it all as though it were one computing environment, without controlling it all.
“Your data center doesn’t define your IT environment anymore,” says Judith Hurwitz, president of the consultancy Hurwitz and Associates and author of Cloud Computing for Dummies. This, she says, makes integration “the most important issue in the cloud.”
Yet there are no standards for integrating cloud computing systems. XML may be the simplest way to move data from one Web-based system to another, but many CIOs venturing into the cloud will have to connect Web and non-Web systems, and do so in a mix of cloud and on-premise environments. It’s a challenge on par with efforts a decade ago to connect back-end legacy systems with Web-based user-facing applications.
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Category: Executives, Resources, Strategy
