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Will The Cloud Mean the End of IT As We Know It?

This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. Read the case study about how Intel Xeon processors and VMware helped virtualize 12 business critical database applications.

olde_typewriter_july10.jpgA study published earlier this year by CA and the Ponemon Institute, a privacy and security group surveyed over 900 IT professionals in the U.S. and Europe about their perceptions, predictions, and practices as on-site systems migrate to the cloud.

The results are particularly striking as they reveal some of the obstacles that cloud computing faces from those who are often responsible for helping implement and maintain a company's technology infrastructure.

Key findings from the study include the following:

  • IT practitioners lack confidence in their organizations' ability to secure data and applications deployed in cloud computing environments (especially public clouds).

  • IT practitioners in both the US and Europe admit they do not have complete knowledge of all the cloud computing resources deployed within their organizations today.

  • Because cloud computing deployment decisions are decentralized (especially SaaS), respondents see end-users (or business management) as more responsible for ensuring a safe cloud computing environment than corporate IT.

  • IT practitioners in both the US and Europe rate the security posture of on-premise computing resources as substantially higher than comparable computing resources in the cloud.

  • IT practitioners believe the security risks most difficult to curtail in the cloud computing environment include securing the physical location of data assets and restricting privileged user access to sensitive data.
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    In a recent article Venkat S. Devraj looks at the ways in which IT departments going to have to prepare themselves for the cloud, whether they want to make the move or not. He contends that part of the struggle with cloud implementation is not the technical obstacles. "The struggles have not emanated necessarily from lack of desire, budget or technology leadership," he writes, "but from cultural challenges."

    These challenges include a perceived shift in power dynamics as self-service models muddy the line between where IT operations and end-users. He believes that IT personnel fear that end users will be granted administrative privileges that will make their activities difficult to oversee and control and will, in turn, increase IT's workload. He also suggests that the cloud will blur some of IT's internal silos, as cloud-based delivery models challenge some of the separations between people in charge of servers, storage, databases, software, and so on.

    As organizations adopt cloud technologies - either sanctioned by IT or not - it remains to be seen how this will impact IT departments. Will it be, as some have suggested, the end of IT as we know it?

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