CIO Profiling: CIO role evolution in cloud and mobile computing

For CIOs who want to drive cloud and mobile computing in their organizations, does efficiency or agility bring more influence to business peers? How should CIOs start this journey-using a private cloud or a public cloud? Is it meaningful to migrate legacy applications to the cloud? Is the innovative results of cloud and mobile computing more likely to come from the key IT resources of individual knowledge workers or organizations? What are the IT skills that CIOs should develop in their teams to stay ahead of the cloud and mobile computing curve?

At a meeting on "CIO roles evolving in cloud and mobile computing" at the March American http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/13513.html "> MIT Sloan CIO Symposium," CIOs discuss these complex issues. Global Crossing CIO and chief Technology Officer (CTO) Anthony D. Christie, VMware CIO Mark Egan;emc CIO and COO (COO) Sanjay Mirchandani and Iron Kings executive vice president and CIO Tasos Tsolakis provides insights on how best to use cloud and mobile computing. They all agree that cloud computing starts with efficiency, but it should bring other benefits quickly. When it comes to migrating legacy applications, the prevailing view is caution. Here are some highlights.

In the internal debate over cloud and mobile computing, should CIOs lead efficiency or agility, or both?

EMC's Mirchandani says that the cloud view is always "starting with efficiency," but should be focused quickly on quality of service (QoS) and it agility. EMC's cloud journey dates back to the 2004, and when asked about internal users, if they could choose, they would choose internal it as their supplier. Clear response: It needs to be improved. His team started to drive efficiencies from server virtualization. Virtualization evolves into cloud products, which increases the quality of IT services across the organization and ultimately leads to greater it agility.

VMware's Egan said he also saw three stages of the journey to the cloud. The first stop is familiarity with technology and its impact on the business. (What are the risks to the business?) Do you want to save money? What kind of governance is needed? The second phase is to use the cloud for critical applications, such as customer Relationship management (CRM) and e-mail. The third phase is agility. "You don't want to let go of the savings, you want to have the right monitoring process in place, so you don't waste resources, but you get the speed," he said. ”

The CIO needs to have a clear understanding of the business issues to be addressed before the debate on efficiency or agility, says Christie of Global crossing.

About a year ago, his team saw the "great value" of putting selected communications and collaborative applications into the cloud. The group began with "Simple things": Audio conferencing. The cloud-based audio conferencing system has been in operation for six months and provides a better user experience while saving 25% of it costs. "Don't tell my CFO that I'm saving money on savings," he said. ”

So efficiency is the driving force to go to the cloud, Christie says, but audio conferencing products quickly "become a platform for other IT services, such as instant messaging, directory services, and telephony."

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)