New, relatively unmanaged and untamed technologies always draw the same analogy: the wild, wild west. That’s what was said about the Internet 15 years ago and several subsets of computing technology, which tend to be unregulated when they first emerge. So is the same situation with the cloud.
As firms move from hosted, dedicated servers to the looser virtualized environment of cloud computing, that old wild, wild west feeling is starting to come back, and if people are going to feel comfortable using cloud services, they must be rules and governance set down for proper administration. So says IT research firm Ovum in a report by Enterprise IT Planet.
Cloud computing has already established itself as the next disruptive technology in the enterprise, but IT governance in the next few years will be vital as companies feel their way through the transition away from on-site software applications to cloud-based options, independent research firm Ovum said in its latest report.
The benefits of the cloud — lower costs, a smaller data-center footprint and immediate access to multiple applications for a distributed, international workforce with minimal fuss — are also some things that can expose companies to degrees of risk that simply weren’t possible during the heyday of locally deployed software installations.
