The growth of cloud services for business has been a hot topic for years now, but 2012 was the year when the cloud went from market hype to mainstream deployment. Most organizations have now adopted a private cloud of some kind, but caution is preventing them from taking full advantage. Exploring the potential benefits of new tools is vital if IT departments hope to see real performance gains.
Recent Gartner research highlights the importance of digital technologies for CIOs in the coming year. Gartner’s Mark McDonald described the problem succinctly, “IT needs new tools if it hopes to hunt for technology-intensive innovation and harvest raised business performance from transformed IT infrastructure, operations and applications. Without change, CIOs and IT consign themselves to tending a garden of legacy assets and responsibilities.”