Category Archives: ovum

5G, Networks, News & Analysis, Ofcom, ovum, Spectum

5G will be commercially ready by 2021 – Ovum

Tablet PC with 5GAnalyst firm Ovum has released its inaugural 5G Subscription Forecasts this week which estimates there will be 24 million 5G subscriptions worldwide at the end of 2021, reports Telecoms.com.

The team at Ovum believe 5G commercial services will be a normalized aspect of the telco landscape by 2020, though this will be dominated by those in North America and Asia, who will account for as much as 80% of global 5G subscriptions by 2021. Europe would only take 10% of the pie, with the Middle-East and Africa splitting the remaining 10%.

While 5G could be considered as an advertising buzzword within the telco industry on the whole, the need for speed has been driven primarily by the advancements in user device capabilities. Claims to be the first vendor to have achieved the 5G status are not uncommon, though Nokia was the latest to make such a statement, in claiming its 5G network stack, which combines radio access technology with a cloud-based packet core, running on top of an AirFrame data centre platform, is the foundation of a commercial 5G architecture. This in itself is a bold claim as 5G standards are yet to be fully ratified.

“The main use case for 5G through 2021will be enhanced mobile broadband services, although fixed broadband services will also be supported, especially in the US,” said Mike Roberts, Ovum Practice Leader for carrier strategy and technology. “Over time 5G will support a host of use cases including Internet of Things and mission-critical communications, but Ovum does not believe those use cases will be supported by standardized 5G services through 2021.”

While announcements claiming organizations are 5G ready, a number of these have been excluded from the research. Numerous operators have claimed they will be launching 5G prior to the 2020 date stated in the research though these are services which will generally be deployed on networks and devices which don’t complying with 5G standards. These examples are seemingly nothing more than advertising ploys playing on the excitement of 5G. Ovum defines a 5G subscription as an active connection to a 5G network via a 5G device. 5G is further defined as a system based on and complying with 3GPP 5G standards.

In the UK, Ofcom has stated 5G services could be commercially available by 2020, though this claim has not been backed up by the team at Ovum. While it has not directly commented on the state of play in the UK, Ovum believe the majority of subscribers will be located in the US, Japan, China, and South Korea, countries where the operators have set more aggressive deadlines for the introduction of 5G services.

One area which has not been cleared up is the future spectrum requirements of 5G. Use cases for the high speed networks have already been outlined, including varied cases such as scientific research to financial trading and weather monitoring, though how the supply of spectrum will be split for immediate and future needs is still unknown.

“5G must deliver a further step change in the capacity of wireless networks, over and above that currently being delivered by 4G,” Steve Unger, Group Director at Ofcom on the website. “No network has infinite capacity, but we need to move closer to the ideal of there always being sufficient capacity to meet consumers’ needs”

Azure, Enterprise IT, Features, Google, HP, hybrid cloud, Interviews, Microsoft, News & Analysis, ovum, Rackspace, Roy Illsley

Hybrid cloud issues are cultural first, technical second – Ovum

CIOs are still struggling with their hybrid cloud strategies

CIOs are still struggling with their hybrid cloud strategies

This week has seen a number of hybrid cloud deals which would suggest the industry is making significant progress delivering the platforms, services and tools necessary to make hybrid cloud practical. But if anything they also serve as a reminder that IT will forever be multimodal which creates challenges that begin with people, not technology, explains Ovum’s principle analyst of infrastructure solutions Roy Illsley.

There has been no shortage of hybrid cloud deals this week.

Rackspace and Microsoft announced a deal that would see the hosting and cloud provider expand its Fanatical Support to Microsoft Azure-based hybrid cloud platforms.

Google both announced it would support Windows technologies on its cloud platform, and that it would formally sponsor the OpenStack foundation – a move aimed at supporting container portability between multiple cloud platforms.

HP announced it would expand its cloud partner programme to include CenturyLink, which runs much of its cloud platform on HP technology, in a move aimed at bolstering HP’s hybrid cloud business and CenturyLink’s customer reach.

But one of the more interesting hybrid cloud stories this week came from the enterprise side of the industry. Copper and gold producer Freeport-McMoRan announced it is embarking on a massive overhaul of its IT systems. In a bid to become more agile the firm said it would deploy its entire application estate on a combination of private and public cloud platforms – though, and somewhat ironically, the company said the entire project would wrap up in five years (which, being pragmatic about IT overhauls, could mean far later).

“The biggest challenge with hybrid cloud isn’t the technology per se – okay, so you need to be able to have one version of the truth, one place where you can manage most the platforms and applications, one place where to the best of your abilities you can orchestrate resources, and so forth,” Illsley explains.

Of course you need all of those things, he says. There will be some systems that won’t fit into that technology model, that will likely be left out (i.e. mainframes). But there are tools out there to fit current hybrid use cases.

“When most organisations ‘do’ hybrid cloud, they tend to choose where their workloads will sit depending on their performance needs, scaling needs, cost and application architecture – and then the workloads sit there, with very little live migration of VMs or containers. Managing them while they sit there isn’t the major pain point. It’s about the business processes; it’s the organisational and cultural shifts in the IT department that are required in order to manage IT in a multimodal world.”

“What’s happening in hybrid cloud isn’t terribly different from what’s happening with DevOps. You have developers and you have operations, and sandwiching them together in one unit doesn’t change the fact that they look at the world – and the day-to-day issues they need to manage or solve – in their own developer or operations-centric ways. In effect they’re still siloed.”

The way IT is financed can also create headaches for CIOs intent on delivering a hybrid cloud strategy. Typically IT is funded in an ‘everyone pitches into the pot’ sort of way, but one of the things that led to the rise of cloud in the first place is line of businesses allocating their own budgets and going out to procure their own services.

“This can cause both a systems challenge – shadow IT and the security, visibility and management issues that come with that – and a cultural challenge, one where LOB heads see little need to fund a central organisation that is deemed too slow or inflexible to respond to customer needs. So as a result, the central pot doesn’t grow.”

While vendors continue to ease hybrid cloud headaches on the technology front with resource and financial (i.e. chargeback) management tools, app stores or catalogues, and standardised platforms that bridge the on-prem and public cloud divide, it’s less likely the cultural challenges associated with hybrid cloud will find any straightforward solutions in the short term.

“It will be like this for the next ten or fifteen years at least. And the way CIOs work with the rest of the business as well as the IT department will define how successful that hybrid strategy will be, and if you don’t do this well then whatever technologies you put in place will be totally redundant,” Illsley says.

Craig McLuckie, Google, Kubernetes, Laurent Lachal, Mark Collier, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, ovum

Google joins OpenStack to build bridges between public and private clouds

Google has joined the OpenStack Foundation, a big sign of support for the open source software organisation

Google has joined the OpenStack Foundation, a big sign of support for the open source software organisation

Google has officially signed up to sponsor the OpenStack Foundation, the first of the big three – Google, Microsoft and AWS – to formally throw its weight behind the open source cloud orchestration software. Analysts believe the move will improve support for Linux containers across public and private cloud environments.

Google has already set to work integrating Kubernetes with OpenStack with pure-play OpenStack software vendor Mirantis, a move the company said would help bolster its hybrid cloud capabilities.

While the company has had some engineers partnering with the Foundation on Magnum and Murano, container-focused toolsets baked into the open source platform, Google said it plans to significantly bolster the engineering resource it devotes to getting Linux containers – and particularly its open source scheduling and deployment platform Kubernetes – integrated with OpenStack.

The formal sign of support from such a big incumbent in the cloud space is a big win for OpenStack.

“We are excited about becoming active participants in the OpenStack community,” said Craig McLuckie, product manager at Google. “We look forward to sharing what we’ve learned and hearing how OpenStack users are thinking about containers and other technologies to support cloud-native apps.”

Mark Collier, chief operating officer of the OpenStack Foundation said: “OpenStack is a platform that frees users to run proven technologies like VMs as well as new technologies like containers. With Google committing unequaled container and container management engineering expertise to our community, the deployment of containers via proven orchestration engines like Kubernetes will accelerate rapidly.”

Although Google has a long history of open sourcing some of the tools it uses to stand up its own cloud and digital services like search it hasn’t always participated with many open source forums per se.

In a sense Kubernetes marked a departure from its previous trajectory, and as Ovum’s lead software analyst Laurent Lachal explained to BCN, it seems to be focusing on containers as a means of building a bridge between private and public clouds.

“Google knows that it needs to play nice with cloud platforms like OpenStack and VMware, two platforms that are primarily private cloud-centric, if it wants to get workloads onto its public cloud,” he explained.

“Joining OpenStack is exactly that – a means to building a bridge between private and public clouds, and supporting containers within the context of OpenStack may be both a means of doing that and generating consensus around how best to support containers in OpenStack, something that could also work in its favour.”

“There’s also a big need for that kind of consensus. Currently, everyone wants to join the containers initiatives in the open source project but there isn’t much backing for one particular way of delivering the container-related features users need,” he added.

Alex Hilton, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, ovum, Ovum Industry Congress, Tim Jennings

Cloud adoption nudges past 80 per cent in the UK – survey

Cloud adoption is on the rise in the UK

Cloud adoption is on the rise in the UK

A recent survey of over 250 UK-based senior IT decision makers shows around 84 per cent are using cloud services, with at least 70 per cent of those organisations already using cloud expecting their adoption to increase over the next 12 months.

The survey, commissioned by UK cloud trade body the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), suggests cloud services have grown substantially in popularity over the past couple of years, with adoption growing 8 per cent over the past year and 75 per cent since 2010.

“Cloud computing has come a long way in just a few short years. When we commissioned our first major research project into the UK Cloud market in 2010, just 48 per cent of organisations had consciously adopted a cloud service,” said Alex Hilton, chief executive officer of the CIF.

“During this time, cloud has moved from the edge of the IT estate to its centre, and it is now largely regarded as just another way that we do IT. Importantly, it is, by and large, delivering the benefits the industry promised it would deliver,” he said.

The organisation believes the impending conclusion of official support for Windows Server 2003 will accelerate cloud adoption over the next year. But Hilton says that many are still a long way off from adopting all-cloud strategies, in part because of legacy.

“Although more organisations than ever are committing to a 100 per cent cloud environment, the vast majority are a long way from migrating their entire IT estates; just 15 per cent consider their primary IT model to now be cloud, and around half of businesses cannot foresee a time when they will move all of their IT to the cloud – instead managing a blend of IT delivery models.”

Some believe cloud adoption is largely being driven outside the IT department. According to Tim Jennings, chief IT analyst at Ovum, cloud often makes its entrance into organisations behind the back of IT.

“It’s less about cost savings and cloud enabling IT at the centre, and more about cloud enabling business processes,” said Jennings, who was speaking at the Ovum Industry Congress in London this week. “This change is firmly in place, and nowhere is this more prevalent than line of business uptake of software-as-a-service.”

“For IT then, the challenge comes back to the ‘Shadow IT’ dilemma – or how to offer a consolidated, continuous, secure set of services,” he added.

Internet of Things, IoT, M2M, Opinion, ovum

The Internet of Things: Where hope tends to triumph over common sense

The Internet of Things is coming. But not anytime soon.

The Internet of Things is coming. But not anytime soon.

The excitement around the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to grow, and even more bullish predictions and lavish promises will be made made about and on behalf of it in the coming months. 2015 will see us reach “peak oil” in the form of increasingly outlandish predictions and plenty of over-enthusiastic venture capital investments.

But the IoT will not change the world in 2015. It will take at least 10 years for the IoT to become pervasive enough to transform the way we live and work, and in the meantime it’s up to us to decode the hype and figure out how the IoT will evolve, who will benefit, and what it takes to build an IoT network.

Let’s look at the predictions that have been made for the number of connected devices. The figure of 1 trillion has been used several times by a range of incumbents and can only have been arrived at using a very, very relaxed definition of what a “connected thing” is. Of course, if you’re willing to include RFID tags in your definition this number is relatively easy to achieve, but it doesn’t do much to help us understand how the IoT will evolve. At Ovum, we’re working on the basis of a window of between 30 billion and 50 billion connected devices by 2020. The reason for the large range is that there are simply too many factors at play to be any more precise.

Another domain where enthusiasm appears to be comfortably ahead of common sense is in discussions about the volume of data that the IoT will generate. Talk of an avalanche of data is nonsense. There will be no avalanche; instead we’ll see a steadily rising tide of data that will take time to become useful. When building IoT networks the “data question” is one of the things architects spend a lot of time thinking and worrying about. In truth, the creators of IoT networks are far more likely to be disappointed that their network is taking far longer than expected to reach the scale of deployment necessary to produce the volumes of data they had boasted about to their backers.

This article appeared in the latest issue of the BCN Magazine. Click here to download a digital version.

Even the question of who will make money out of the IoT, and where they will make it, is being influenced too much by hope and not enough by common sense. The future of the IoT does not lie in the connected home or in bracelets that count your steps and measure your heartbeat. The vast majority of IoT devices will not beautify our homes or help us with our personal training regime. Instead they will be put to work performing very mundane tasks like monitoring the location of shipping containers, parcels, and people. The “Industrial IoT” which spans manufacturing, utilities, distribution and logistics will make up by far the greatest share of the IoT market. These devices will largely remain unseen by us, most will be of an industrial grey colour, and only a very small number of them will produce data that is of any interest whatsoever outside a very specific and limited context.

Indeed, the “connected home” is going to be one of the biggest disappointments of the Internet of Things, as its promoters learn that the ability to change the colour of your livingroom lights while away on business doesn’t actually amount to a “life changing experience”. That isn’t to say that our homes won’t be increasingly instrumented and connected, they will. But the really transformational aspects of the IoT lie beyond the home.

There are two other domains where IoT will deliver transformation, but over a much longer timescale than enthusiasts predict. In the world of automotive, cars will become increasingly connected and increasingly smart. But it will take over a decade before the majority of cars in use can boast the levels of connectivity and intelligence we are now seeing in experimental form. The other domain that will be transformed over the long-term is healthcare, where IoT will provide us with the ability to monitor and diagnose conditions remotely, and enable us to deliver increasingly sophisticated healthcare services well beyond the boundaries of the hospital or the doctor’s surgery.

Gary Barnett

But again, we are in the earliest stages of research and experimentation and proving some of the ideas are practical, safe and beneficial enough to merit broader roll-out will take years and not months. The Internet of Things will transform the way we understand our environment as well as the people and things that exist within it, but that transformation will barely have begun by 2020.

Gary Barnett is Chief Analyst, Software with Ovum and also serves as the CTO for a non-profit organisation that is currently deploying what it hopes will become the world’s biggest urban air quality monitoring network.

Andrew Kellett, data protection, Data security, News & Analysis, ovum

Ovum: Security skills shortage remains most prevalent barrier in cloud

Security skills shortages are hampering IT's ability to adopt cloud services

A security skills shortage is hampering cloud adoption

Security and an IT security skills shortage remain the most prevalent barriers to cloud uptake, according to Ovum principle analyst Andrew Kellett.

Although Ovum’s research suggests the volume of sensitive corporate data stored in the cloud continues to grow, with enterprise cloud adoption rates exceeding 80 per cent, in many cases this data is not adequately protected.

“Security, or lack thereof, is a significant issue. If there is one problem area inhibiting further adoption of cloud-based services, it is enterprise concerns about shortfalls in the protection regimes of many cloud service providers,” Kellet said, adding that since more sensitive data appears to be stored in the cloud the most basic security practices and controls aren’t necessarily enough.

“On too many occasions, security policies only come into place once a new technology has already gone mainstream, and this is certainly true of the cloud industry. Many cloud providers have been guilty of ‘bolting on’ security as an afterthought, something which has left previous generations of technology vulnerable to malware attacks, advanced persistent threats and other breach tactics.”

“Whether they like it or not, organisations are putting their trust in the hands of the service provider, often without being completely satisfied that such trust is justified or that service levels and protection can be maintained,” he concluded.

Other recently published research from Ovum suggests enterprises are quite concerned with how their cloud service providers implement security controls. The company recently surveyed 818 ITDMs for their views on cloud security and found that in the US specifically, respondents seemed most concerned about lack of control over the location of data (82 per cent), increased vulnerability of shared infrastructure (79 per cent), and “privileged user” abuse of the cloud service provider (78 per cent).

Alan Kessler, Andrew Kellett, cloud security, encryption, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, ovum, Vormetric

Ovum: Cloud service providers need to double down on security

Enterprises would be more willing to use cloud if providers focused more on security, compliance

Enterprises would be more willing to use cloud if providers focused more on security, compliance

A recently published Vormetric survey suggests over half of enterprises globally are using cloud-based services to store sensitive data, and many of the IT decision makers polled by the firm said they felt pressured into using cloud services over legacy alternatives. But respondents also showed an overwhelming willingness to use cloud services to store or analyse sensitive data if service providers could guarantee some essential security and information governance capabilities and measures.

Vormetric, which worked with Ovum to petition 818 ITDMs globally on their use of cloud and big data platforms, said about 54 per cent of respondents globally were keeping sensitive information in the cloud. Interestingly, 46 per cent of all respondents expressed concerns that market pressures are forcing them to use cloud services.

And though databases and file servers were typically rated by respondents as top risks for storage of sensitive information, they are now also joined by big data environments – with big data (31 per cent) seen by ITDMs as slightly more at risk than file servers (29 per cent).

In the US specifically, respondents seemed most concerned about lack of control over the location of data (82 per cent), increased vulnerability of shared infrastructure (79 per cent), and “privileged user” abuse of the cloud service provider (78 per cent).

“The data shows that US IT decision makers are conflicted about their cloud deployments,” said Alan Kessler, chief executive officer of Vormetric. “Market pressures and the benefits of cloud service use are strong, but enterprises have serious security concerns around these environments. There is enormous anxiety over how sensitive data and systems can best be protected, with lack of control listed as the number one worry among US respondents.”

“For cloud service providers to increase their footprint in the enterprise, they must address enterprise requirements around security, data protection and data management. More specifically, cloud service providers need to provide better protection and visibility to their customers,” Kessler said.

Andrew Kellett, lead analyst for Ovum and author of the 2015 Vormetric Insider Threat Report said the results demonstrate “both hope and fear” when it comes to cloud and big data technologies, which could slow the pace at which enterprises refresh their technology platforms.

“But, there are steps enterprises can take and changes providers can make that will increase adoption. For example, more than half of global respondents would be more willing to use cloud services if the provider offers data encryption with key access control,” he said.

About 52 per cent also said they would be more likely to use cloud services if service level commitments and liability terms for a data breach were established, 48 per cent said the same if explicit security descriptions and compliance commitment were established.

Alan Kessler, Andrew Kellett, cloud security, encryption, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, ovum, Vormetric

Ovum: Cloud service providers need to double down on security

Enterprises would be more willing to use cloud if providers focused more on security, compliance

Enterprises would be more willing to use cloud if providers focused more on security, compliance

A recently published Vormetric survey suggests over half of enterprises globally are using cloud-based services to store sensitive data, and many of the IT decision makers polled by the firm said they felt pressured into using cloud services over legacy alternatives. But respondents also showed an overwhelming willingness to use cloud services to store or analyse sensitive data if service providers could guarantee some essential security and information governance capabilities and measures.

Vormetric, which worked with Ovum to petition 818 ITDMs globally on their use of cloud and big data platforms, said about 54 per cent of respondents globally were keeping sensitive information in the cloud. Interestingly, 46 per cent of all respondents expressed concerns that market pressures are forcing them to use cloud services.

And though databases and file servers were typically rated by respondents as top risks for storage of sensitive information, they are now also joined by big data environments – with big data (31 per cent) seen by ITDMs as slightly more at risk than file servers (29 per cent).

In the US specifically, respondents seemed most concerned about lack of control over the location of data (82 per cent), increased vulnerability of shared infrastructure (79 per cent), and “privileged user” abuse of the cloud service provider (78 per cent).

“The data shows that US IT decision makers are conflicted about their cloud deployments,” said Alan Kessler, chief executive officer of Vormetric. “Market pressures and the benefits of cloud service use are strong, but enterprises have serious security concerns around these environments. There is enormous anxiety over how sensitive data and systems can best be protected, with lack of control listed as the number one worry among US respondents.”

“For cloud service providers to increase their footprint in the enterprise, they must address enterprise requirements around security, data protection and data management. More specifically, cloud service providers need to provide better protection and visibility to their customers,” Kessler said.

Andrew Kellett, lead analyst for Ovum and author of the 2015 Vormetric Insider Threat Report said the results demonstrate “both hope and fear” when it comes to cloud and big data technologies, which could slow the pace at which enterprises refresh their technology platforms.

“But, there are steps enterprises can take and changes providers can make that will increase adoption. For example, more than half of global respondents would be more willing to use cloud services if the provider offers data encryption with key access control,” he said.

About 52 per cent also said they would be more likely to use cloud services if service level commitments and liability terms for a data breach were established, 48 per cent said the same if explicit security descriptions and compliance commitment were established.

Cloud strategy, Enterprise IT, Features, Laurent Lachal, Opinion, ovum, software

How to achieve success in the cloud

To cloud or not to cloud? With the right strategy, it need not be the question.

To cloud or not to cloud? With the right strategy, it need not be the question.

There are two sides to the cloud coin: one positive, the other negative, and too many people focus on one at the expense of the other for a variety of reasons ranging from ignorance to wilful misdirection. But ultimately, success resides in embracing both sides and pulling together the capabilities of both enterprises and their suppliers to make the most of the positive and limit the negative.

Cloud services can either alleviate or compound the business challenges identified by Ovum’s annual ICT Enterprise Insights program, based on interviews with 6,500 senior IT executives. On the positive side both public and private clouds, and everything in between, help:

• Boost ROI at various levels: From squeezing more utilization from the underlying infrastructure to making it easier to launch new projects with the extra resources exposed asa result.

• Deal with the trauma of major organisational/ structural changes as they can adapt to the ups and downs of requirements evolution.

• Improve customer/citizen experience, and therefore satisfaction: This has been one of the top drivers for cloud adoption. Cloud computing is at its heart user experience-centric. Unfortunately many forget this, preferring instead to approach cloud computing from a technical perspective.

• Deal with security, security compliance, and regulatory compliance: An increasing number of companies acknowledge that public cloud security and compliance credentials are at least as good if not better than their own, particularly in a world where security and compliance challenges are evolving so rapidly. Similarly, private clouds require security to shift from reactive and static to proactive and dynamic security, whereby workloads and data need to be secured as they move in and out of internal IT’s boundaries.

On the other hand, cloud services have the potential to compound business challenges. For instance, the rise of public cloud adoption contributes to challenges related to increasing levels of outsourcing. It is all about relationship management, and therefore relates to another business challenge: improving supplier relationships.

In addition to having to adapt to new public cloud offerings (rather than the other way round), once the right contract is signed (another challenging task), enterprises need to proactively manage not only their use of the service but also their relationships with the service provider, if only to be able to keep up with their fast-evolving offerings.

Similarly, cloud computing adds to the age-old challenge of aligning business and IT at two levels: cloud-enabling IT, and cloud-centric business transformation.

From a cloud-enabling IT perspective, the challenge is to understand, manage, and bridge a variety of internal divides and convergences, including consumer versus enterprise IT, developers versus IT operations, and virtualisation ops people versus network and storage ops. As the pace of software delivery accelerates, developers and administrators need to not only to learn from and collaborate with one another, but also deliver the right user experience – not just the right business outcomes. Virtualisation ops people tend to be much more in favour than network and storage ops people of software-defined datacentre, storage, and networking (SDDC, SDS, SDN) with a view to increasingly take control of datacentre and network resources. But the storage and network ops people, however, are not so keen on letting the virtualisation people in.

When it comes to cloud-centric business transformation, IT is increasingly defined in terms of business outcomes within the context of its evolution from application siloes to standardised, shared, and metered IT resources, from a push to a pull provisioning model, and more importantly, from a cost centre to an innovation engine.

The challenge, then, is to understand, manage, and bridge a variety of internal divides and convergences including:

• Outside-in (public clouds for green-field application development) versus inside-out (private cloud for legacy applicationmodernization) perspectives. Supporters of the two approaches can be found on both the business and IT sides of the enterprise.

• Line-of-business executives (CFO, CMO, CSO) versus CIOs regarding cloud-related roles, budgets, and strategies: The up-andcoming role of chief digital officer (CDO) exemplifies the convergence between technology and business C-level executives. All CxOs can potentially fulfil this role, with CDOs increasingly regarded as “CEOs in waiting”. In this context, there is a tendency to describe the role as the object of a war between CIOs and other CxOs. But what digital enterprises need is not CxOs battling each other, but coordinating their IT investments and strategies. Easier said than done since, beyond the usual political struggles, there is a disparity between all side in terms of knowledge, priorities, and concerns.

• Top executives versus middle management: Top executives who are broadly in favour of cloud computing in all its guises, versus middle management who are much less eager to take it on board, but need to be won over since they are critical to cloud strategy execution.

Laurent Lachal

• Shadow IT versus Official IT: Where IT acknowledges the benefits of Shadow IT (it makes an organisation more responsive and capable of delivering products and services that IT cannot currently support) and its shortcomings (in terms of costs, security, and lack of coordination, for example). However, too much focus on control at the expense of user experience and empowerment perpetuates shadow IT.

Only then will your organisation manage to balance both sides of the cloud coin.

Laurent Lachal is leading Ovum Software Group’s cloud computing research. Besides Ovum, where he has spent most of his 20 year career as an analyst, Laurent has also been European software market group manager at Gartner Ltd.