Leena Rao: McKinsey’s Cloud Computing Report Is Partly Cloudy
Leena analyzes a McKinsey report that essentially comes to the conclusion that “The Cloud” is not yet attractive to enterprise customers. This in itself isn’t earth shattering, as cloud computing adoption has been predominantly driven by small and midsize organizations; what is interesting is that there seems to be more of a focus in the report on commodity services, which misses the bigger point of cloud computing. The goal with cloud computing is not necessarily to commoditize IT infrastructure, although that is of course a consequence of consolidating services and building economies of scale; cloud computing is driving innovative new services and service delivery models that are changing the IT landscape. To place so much focus on cost cutting and to seemingly downplay the value added through innovation and agility is to perpetuate the status quo and keep the traditional IT model on life support, which only delays the inevitable shift to the cloud for the majority of enterprises that do not derive strategic advantage from their IT services or have a valid business reason to build out their own cloud-like services internally.
