What Every CEO Needs to Know About the Cloud by Andrew Mcafee

What Every CEO Needs to Know About The Cloud by Andrew McAfee

The true benefits of cloud computing will surprise you. But you’ll need the right people to lead the transformation.

This article originally appeared in Harvard Business Review (reprint #R1111J).

sponsored by

In 2010 an IBM survey factory owners, so too will the cloud confer advan- of more than 1,500 CEOs worldwide revealed tages on its adopters. a troubling gap: Close to 80% of them believed their At present, there’s a lot of uncertainty and skepti- environment would grow much more complex in cism around the cloud, particularly among technol- the coming years, but fewer than half thought their ogy professionals who have deep expertise with, or companies were well equipped to deal with this shift. attachment to, on-premise computing. Companies The survey team called it “the largest leadership shouldn’t give such people too much influence over challenge identified in eight years of research.” plans to move into the cloud; that would be like put- Unfortunately, the information technology in- ting the crew that ran the boiler and steam turbine in frastructure at many large companies only makes charge of electrifying a factory. The CEO and other this challenge more difficult. Their technology en- senior business executives need to take responsi- vironments actually impede their ability to sense bility for bringing their organizations into the era of change and respond quickly. While there is no sim- cloud computing. ple fix for this problem, help is at hand in the form When I talk to executives about the cloud, three of cloud computing, a new suite of digital tools and questions always come up: Why will the cloud be approaches. a big deal beyond the IT department? What are the Cloud computing is a sharp departure from the main concerns and areas of skepticism, and how status quo. Today most companies own their soft- valid are they? And how should we get started? In ware and hardware and keep them “on premise” in this article I’ll address those questions. I’ll explain data centers and other specialized facilities. With the cloud and its benefits, highlight how perceived cloud computing, in contrast, companies lease their barriers and other concerns will keep many com- digital assets, and their employees don’t know the panies from taking full advantage of it, discuss the location of the computers, data centers, applications, implications of various responses, and recommend and databases that they’re using. These resources actions. are just “in the cloud” somewhere. To advocates of cloud computing, that’s the The Benefits of the Cloud whole point. Customers don’t have to concern them- Some people maintain that there’s nothing magic selves with details; they just rent what they need about the cloud—that anything it can do, on-premise from the cloud. (For a more detailed explanation, see approaches can also accomplish. That argument is the sidebar “What Is the Cloud?”) correct in theory, at least for large companies that can How important is cloud computing? I would ar- afford comprehensive enterprise software and top IT gue that it’s a sea change—a deep and permanent talent. Such companies can buy or build software for shift in how computing power is generated and collaboration or analytics—or anything else—and consumed. It’s as inevitable and irreversible as the install it in their own data centers. They can enable shift from steam to electric power in manufacturing, these applications for different devices—desktops, which was gaining momentum in America about laptops, tablets, and smartphones—and make them a century ago. And just as that transition brought accessible to employees at home and on the road via many benefits and opened up new possibilities to web browsers. They can also open this infrastructure to people outside the organization, such as contractors, suppliers, and joint venture partners. They can—but they rarely do. This is not because Delegating the move to the cloud their IT departments are incompetent. It’s because they’re stretched, and doing all the things listed above is surprisingly difficult, expensive, and time- to traditional IT people is like consuming, especially if a company is trying to repur- pose older legacy technology for the modern age. putting the crew running the boiler On average, only 11% of a company’s IT budget is spent on developing new applications, according to and steam turbine in charge of Microsoft; the rest goes to maintenance and infrastructure. Much of that 11% is devoted to big “stra- electrifying a factory. tegic” efforts like purchasing and deploying a core 2 Harvard Business Review November 2011 Idea in Brief Many criticisms of The cloud is a topic cious little bandwidth employees discover cloud computing CEOs must engage on, for development and novel ways to use the are ill-informed because many of the new initiatives. The technology. and overhyped, executives they typically cloud offers a way for Typical concerns giving executives delegate technology de- companies to pursue about cost, security, cover for not cisions to are precisely opportunities nimbly and reliability are red the wrong people to of- and, in many cases, herrings because those investigating the fer unbiased guidance. cost-effectively. concerns are compa- potential of the Most IT departments What’s more, many rable for on-premise technology. This today are stretched unanticipated cloud approaches. is a mistake. thin with maintenance benefits arise after a activities, leaving pre- project is launched and

enterprise system. That leaves very few resources ful suite of collaboration features that has improved for, say, ensuring that employees have access to all productivity tremendously.” the documents they need no matter where they are, Balfour’s experience illustrates a common pat- what device they are using, and whom they’re work- tern in the introduction of novel technologies: The ing with. unanticipated benefits often outweigh the intended Making individuals more productive. For ones. On each job, Balfour employees need to share global contractor Balfour Beatty, that kind of access documents with an ever-shifting mix of customers, is a critical capability. The company’s design and contractors, inspectors, and so on. This is easy to do construction professionals spend much of their time when they can administer their own accounts, and on job sites overseas, where they need instant and hard to do in the pre-cloud world. Cloud-based file reliable access to cost estimates, photos, blueprints, management was initiated to make individuals more and other large files. For 10 years, Balfour had been productive but ended up delivering group-level ben- managing uploads and downloads of all those docu- efits as well. ments with an internal FTP server maintained by the Facilitating collaboration. In fact, some of IT department, which was difficult to use and con- cloud computing’s greatest successes to date have stantly running out of capacity. come from allowing groups and communities to So the company turned to Box, a provider of work together in ways that were not previously pos- cloud-based content management and file sharing. sible. To improve the way knowledge was captured As is often the case with cloud offerings, resources and shared among its 90,000 people, the consulting stored on Box can be accessed via a web browser or firm CSC turned to Jive, a maker of cloud-based col- applications developed for computers, tablets, and laboration software. The first step was an experiment smartphones. As long as Balfour employees have an to see if people would be receptive to working with internet-connected device, they have access to all the software. Jive was made available to all employ- their files when on the road. ees, an approach that would have been prohibitively Though the company had implemented Box to expensive if CSC had needed to buy all the hardware get easier access to its information, it soon noticed and software licenses itself. People could use the other advantages. With the FTP server, the IT de- platform to, among other things, pose a question to partment had to sign up each new user and create a the whole company, visit and contribute to digital fo- unique folder for him or her. If a user wanted to in- rums like “Where Have We Done This Before?” and vite a collaborator into that folder, the request also “Excel Power Tips,” and set up new communities on had to be routed through IT. With the new cloud- the fly. based solution, in contrast, users could administer During the initial 20-week experiment, more their own accounts and digital properties, saving than 25,000 people registered for the new cloud- valuable time. Director of IT operations Rick Roman based resource, called C3. They created more than explains: “One of the comments we were continually 2,100 groups and logged as many as 150,000 activi- getting from our end users was that they wanted an ties per month. Those results persuaded the com- up-to-date solution that was powerful and flexible pany to make C3 permanent. “C3 has been simply enough to fit the way they work. With Box, not only stunning,” Lem Lasher, the company’s president did we find a solution that met the requirements that and chief innovation officer, told the audience at an our employees were asking for, but it gave us a use- Enterprise 2.0 conference in 2010. “It is the de facto

November 2011 Harvard Business Review 3 WHAT EVERY CEO NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT THE CLOUD What Is the Cloud? The cloud computing To oversimplify just a bit, those expertise; they want access Python, and Ruby on Rails industry is growing offerings can be divided into to computing power but don’t and allow customers to start three categories: raw comput- want to be responsible for writing code quickly. Once and evolving rap- ing capacity, computers that installing or maintaining it. the code is ready, the vendor idly—and also gen- are ready for software, and The second tier is called hosts it and makes it widely erating lots of jargon. software itself. PLATFORM-AS-A-SERVICE available. PaaS is currently the As a result it can be The first of these, called (PAAS). This is a cloud-based smallest segment of the cloud INFRASTRUCTURE-AS-A- platform that companies can computing market and is often difficult to under- SERVICE (IAAS), is the most use to develop their custom used by established compa- stand exactly what basic; it’s a server or servers applications or write soft- nies looking to outsource a the cloud is and how out there in the cloud, or a ware that integrates with piece of their infrastructure. its offerings differ. bunch of storage capacity or existing applications. PaaS SOFTWARE-AS-A-SERVICE bandwidth. IaaS customers, environments come equipped (SAAS), the third category, is which are often tech compa- with software development the largest and most mature nies, typically have a lot of IT technologies like Java, .NET, part of the cloud. It’s an ap-

standard for how we collaborate. It’s the language of action. The results can be surprising and dramatic. the company.” According to the company, one casual dining res- Mining insights from data. Analytics has been taurant in Marina del Rey, California, saw a profit in- one of the other areas of greatest activity in the cloud. crease of $20,000 to $40,000 a year after using ARG Companies today gather a massive amount of data, to detect employee theft. To acquire this capability and cloud providers are supplying the hardware and from the cloud, the restaurant owner didn’t have to algorithms to help businesses generate advantages buy or install any new software, hire technologists from it. Many of these efforts have focused on un- or analysts, or alter his technology infrastructure in derstanding, predicting, and influencing customer any way. He simply had to request ARG from Radiant. behavior both online and offline. But Radiant Sys- Developing and hosting applications. Before tems, which supplies the Aloha point-of-sale system the cloud, software developers typically had to buy, to thousands of restaurants and keeps their data, is configure, and maintain their own servers. Those ac- using cloud analytics in a different way—to help its tivities are often perceived as a hassle and a distrac- clients control their operations more tightly. tion from the core work of writing good code. Shrinkage, a polite term for employee theft, is a That was a problem 3M hoped to avoid as it de- serious problem in the food service industry, but it’s veloped its Visual Attention Service, a set of software hard for restaurant owners to closely monitor serv- tools that indicate where people will focus their at- ers and bartenders in their busy work environments. tention when looking at an image. The company Radiant realized that the huge amounts of low-level wanted to make these tools available to graphic de- transaction data it kept for each customer could be signers and others via a web-based application but analyzed for suspicious patterns, such as a volume was unsure how much demand there would be for of large tips far above average for bartenders on a the offering. “To play it safe, we would have had to Friday night. When this occurs, it’s likely that the invest in significant server capacity, especially since bartender is not charging people for drinks in hopes our service is so computationally intensive,” says 3M of getting a big tip. business manager Bill Smyth. 3M therefore turned to Using data from all its customers, Radiant de- the Windows Azure cloud platform from Microsoft veloped a set of algorithms to detect many types of to host the application. According to Smyth, “The shrinkage and bundled them into an offering called cloud gave us the ability to add capacity quickly and Aloha Restaurant Guard (ARG), which generates a easily, and with no capital.” weekly set of reports on suspicious activity by site In addition to hosting applications, cloud pro- and by employee. These are sent to restaurant own- viders are making their own powerful software ers and managers, who use them to take corrective available to customers. Google Earth Builder, for

4 Harvard Business Review November 2011 What Is the Cloud? plication or suite of applica- with Google Apps, Microsoft finally, it’s usually fast and of the public cloud while ad- tions that resides in the cloud Office 365, and other similar easy to get more from the dressing security and regula- instead of on a user’s hard offerings. cloud—more storage from tory concerns. However, I’m drive or in a data center. One Cloud offerings share a few an IaaS vendor, the ability to skeptical. The scale economies of the earliest SaaS successes similarities across these three handle more PaaS projects, or of public cloud companies was Salesforce.com’s customer categories. First, customers more seats for users of a SaaS lead to great cost decreases relationship management rent them instead of buying application. over time, and because their software, which provided an them, shifting IT from a capital Some large organizations environments are intensely alternative to on-premise CRM expense to an operating are planning to build “private competitive, those decreases systems when it was launched, expense. Second, vendors clouds” that they will own and will surely be reflected in in 2000. More recently, pro- are responsible for everything maintain. These are essentially their prices. I doubt that most ductivity and collaboration “beneath the hood”—all the data centers that use many of private clouds will be able to software—spreadsheets, word maintenance, administration, the cloud’s technologies. Pri- keep up. processing programs, and so capacity planning, trouble- vate clouds hold the promise on—has moved into the cloud shooting, and backups. And of offering all the advantages

example, is a set of digital tools for geospatial data among the companies that have stated publicly that visualization and analysis that allows organiza- the cloud is a major part of their computing strategy. tions to upload their own data and layer them onto They have realized that they don’t have to own tech- popular resources like Google Earth, Google Chart nology themselves to compete effectively. They see, Tools, and Google Maps. Ergon Energy, the electric- in fact, that owning all the computing assets they ity supplier for Queensland, Australia, plans to fly use is actually more likely to hamper their progress a customized airplane over its 150,000 kilometers than accelerate it. of power lines, gather data about them, and trans- fer the data to Google Earth Builder. Ergon CEO Ian The Skeptics’ Concerns McLeod says that the company will use the data-rich For all its compelling advantages and leading propo- maps and pictures that result to “understand the en- nents, the shift to cloud computing has been slow. A vironmental status of the network and its associated 2009 Forrester study found that 37% of large com- risks. With this intelligence we can make better busi- panies were “not interested” in the cloud. Another ness decisions around our investments and improve 39% were interested but had no immediate plans to operational response and business performance in explore it. A 2011 survey by InformationWeek found key areas such as vegetation management, disaster that only 29% of respondents had analyzed the response, designing customer connections, and aug- impact of the cloud on their internet-facing archi- menting the networks.” tecture. And the technology research firm Gartner As these examples illustrate, the cloud offers ben- predicts that while cloud computing will grow at an efits at the level of the individual and the group, and annual rate of 19% through 2015, it will account for of the data and the application. It allows companies less than 5% of total worldwide IT spending that year. to increase the scale and power of their IT and the Why so slow? Moving an enterprise’s legacy IT speed at which it can be accessed and deployed. It into the cloud is difficult because it forces tough eliminates administrative headaches and works decisions about consolidation and standardization. across locations, devices, and organizational bound- Most organizations that have been around awhile aries. All these advantages will increase as we move have a hodgepodge of hardware, operating systems, deeper into the era of cloud computing. and applications, often described as “legacy spa- Recognizing this, forward-looking companies are ghetti.” It can’t simply be transferred to the cloud but making aggressive use of the cloud even when they must first be untangled and simplified. And though have the technical, financial, and human resources everyone may grouse about legacy spaghetti, few are to pursue any computing strategy. The video service willing to give up their portion of it just so their com- Netflix, the social game maker Zynga, and eBay are pany can move to the cloud.

November 2011 Harvard Business Review 5 WHAT EVERY CEO NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT THE CLOUD How to Start Moving into the Cloud Most companies are just starting to explore the possibilities of cloud computing. Here are a few guidelines on how to get started.

Identify restrictions Start running experi- Do your next develop- Talk with your core and gray areas. In some ments with software- ment project in the enterprise software industries and geographies, as-a-service. A wide cloud. If you’re still buying vendors to understand laws and regulations prohibit variety of powerful business servers and other gear to cre- their plans for the putting data in the cloud or software is currently available ate development “sandboxes” cloud. Many if not most of create confusion about what’s in the cloud. This includes for the software you write their offerings are currently permissible. Executives should applications for office produc- yourself, stop and ask why. available only on-premise. begin by understanding as tivity and collaboration (such Infrastructure-as-a-service When are they going to release clearly as possible the risks as Google Apps, Microsoft offerings are now quite mature, cloud versions of their applica- and no-gos of the cloud for Office 365, Jive, Socialtext, and platform-as-a-service ones tions? How are they going to their companies and should Yammer, and Spigit), customer are getting there quickly. They help their current customers involve their general counsels relationship management free developers from the head- migrate to them? and compliance departments (Salesforce.com), human re- aches of buying, maintaining, As you take steps into the from the start. They’ll have source management (Success- and adding gear and let them cloud, you’ll very likely be to decide whether to adopt Factors, Workday), and social concentrate on the real work working with your company’s IT a conservative or aggressive media monitoring (HubSpot, of writing good code. department and CIO. Their atti- approach in the face of those Radian6). The cloud also contains tudes toward cloud computing risks. Because of the cloud’s Pick a couple of apps and powerful software resources will be critical and highly re- growing importance, I advise experiment with them. Experi- that developers can plug into. vealing. In my view, a CIO’s lack boldness for most compa- ments are very different from Google Maps and Chart Tools, of enthusiasm about the cloud nies, with possible exceptions pilots or trials. Well-designed for example, can be easily these days is about as red a including those handling data business experiments have integrated with a company’s flag as a factory manager’s dis- that involve personal health control groups (parts of the data to produce a wide range interest in electrification would information and information company that don’t get the of visualizations. Over time, have been a century ago. subject to export restrictions. cloud software) and data more and more of the business collection (compared with world’s software is going to live the control group, did total in the cloud. You probably want IT support costs go down, to be part of this trend sooner employee satisfaction go up, rather than later. and business results improve?). Results from these experiments will indicate whether use of the cloud should be expanded.

Cost. The widespread uncertainty about the recommended, “When considering which systems cloud may be most apparent in debates over its com- are candidates for the cloud, companies need to start parative cost. with the basics: Is this move going to save money?” The findings about cost have been contradic- The focus on cost is misguided for two reasons. tory. For instance, in 2009 a McKinsey case study First, most companies don’t spend massive amounts involving a disguised client concluded that putting on technology, so even substantial changes in the IT the client’s entire data center into the cloud would budget won’t make a large difference on the income increase costs by 144%. The following year a report statement. Gartner estimates that for S&P 500 com- by Microsoft (a company with a stake in cloud companies, all IT-related costs accounted for just 3.2% of puting) concluded that it would be cheaper for all en- revenue, on average, in 2009. terprises to put their servers in the cloud. Such sharp Second, over time the economics of building and differences of opinion make it difficult to follow the running a technology infrastructure will favor the advice of a 2011 Wall Street Journal article, which cloud. Cloud providers purchase massive amounts

6 Harvard Business Review November 2011 of hardware, bandwidth, and power, and so can get be intercepted; firewalls can be breached; viruses, better prices. Because they also buy gear all the time, worms, and other forms of malware can invade. they can take continual advantage of the computing Perhaps most unsettling, the people responsible for cost declines predicted by Moore’s Law. These fac- digital infrastructure can steal secrets or get sloppy tors will combine to constantly drive down the costs and let thieves in. As the Harvard law professor Jon- of cloud computing and the charges to customers. athan Zittrain wrote, “Before, the bad guys usually Amazon Web Services, for example, has reduced its needed to get their hands on people’s computers to prices a dozen times in the past three years, even see their secrets; in today’s cloud all you need is a though it does not yet face intense competitive password.” However, this is true for every computer pressure. network, including the ones that companies run Reliability. Whether or not the cloud is cheaper, themselves. many skeptics hold that it’s not as reliable as a well- Like service interruptions, security breaches at managed on-premise infrastructure. The infrastruc- cloud computing companies are big news, and the ture you control, they argue, is more stable than the 2011 incidents at the storage provider Dropbox and one you don’t. the e-mail marketer Epsilon were well covered. But The cloud’s reliability was called into question it’s worth keeping in mind that 90% of businesses most sharply in April 2011, when large portions of surveyed by the Ponemon Institute, a privacy re- Amazon’s Web Services infrastructure went down for search firm, had one or more security breaches a year. as long as three days. This was a major blow to many The only way to have 100% computer security is companies that used it. But not all of them. Netflix, to have zero computers. The next best approach is for example, relied heavily on Amazon, yet remained to constantly monitor the threat landscape; buy or unaffected by the outage. build the best technologies to protect devices, net- How did Netflix escape a crisis? By working hard works, and transmissions; and hire and retain top to build in redundancy so that it could stay running digital security specialists. Cloud computing ven- in the event of a huge disruption. Amazon’s failure dors are better able to do this than all but the very was serious but affected only one of its U.S. data cen- largest and most security-conscious organizations. ters. Amazon had also explicitly advised its custom- For most companies, however, security means ers to design their architectures to withstand a ser- more than just keeping the bad guys out. It also vice interruption. Netflix took that recommendation means controlling who’s able to do and see what, to heart, going so far as to build a system called the over time and across changing conditions. The Chaos Monkey. This digital primate’s job is to auto- documents and spreadsheets related to a potential matically and randomly shut down major parts of the merger, for example, should be visible only to the company’s technology environment. Because Netflix team working on the deal, and when employees learned to handle its own Chaos Monkey, it was pre- leave the company, it should be quick and simple pared to deal with the breakdown caused by Amazon. to terminate their access to the company’s digital Cloud companies are gradually learning this resources. lesson and improving the redundancy and reliabil- Many organizations can exercise this kind of con- ity of their offerings. Every outage by a prominent trol pretty well with their on-premise computing cloud vendor receives a great deal of attention, but overall cloud reliability records are admirable—and would be the envy of most on-premise operations. Google’s Gmail service, for example, was available for 99.984% of 2010, or for all but seven minutes Over time the economics of each month. The Radicati Group, a technology market research firm, estimates that this is approxi- of building and running a mately 32 times more reliable than the average corporate e-mail system. Banks’ trading systems might technology infrastructure need greater uptime than this, but for most other uses it suffices. will favor the cloud over Security. The security of the cloud is also fre- quently questioned. It’s true that transmissions can on-premise computing. November 2011 Harvard Business Review 7 WHAT EVERY CEO NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT THE CLOUD

gal and regulatory considerations, if any, that accom- In 2011 the CIO of the United pany a shift to the cloud. (See the sidebar “How to Start Moving into the Cloud.”) It’s true that clarity is States called for moving often difficult here; some regulations are vague, and case law has not yet had time to accumulate. But it’s $20 billion, or one quarter, of all also true that many organizations are taking too conservative an approach to the cloud and that they’re federal IT spending into the cloud. able to do far more than they think. For an example of a large organization that despite its many regulatory requirements is moving aggressively into the cloud, look no farther than the U.S. government. In environments, which include substantial adminis- 2011, Vivek Kundra, who was the government’s CIO trative capability. Some cloud offerings, in contrast, at the time, announced a strategy calling for $20 bil- can’t. This is because they were originally designed lion, or about one quarter, of all federal IT spending for individuals or small groups of peers, not for hi- to move into the cloud. erarchical organizations in which some people have both the right and the responsibility to exercise con- IF YOU’LL PARDON THE PUN, the near-term forecast for trol over others. corporate computing is only partly cloudy. Uncer- Cloud vendors who are interested in the large tainty about the cloud’s benefits and concerns over enterprise market are working to incorporate ad- cost, reliability, security, and regulation will keep ministrative functionality into their products; many many (if not most) companies and their executive have already done so. As it matures, this functional- teams from making bold moves. ity should allay the most serious security concerns. What are the business implications of this un- Regulation. It’s not possible to discuss, or even even adoption of cloud computing? If the cloud’s list, all the legal and regulatory barriers to the cloud only impact was on companies’ IT budgets, the im- here, but many have to do with data access and plications would be minor, but as we’ve seen, this is transport. The U.S. Health Insurance Portability and not the case. Cloud computing offers advantages in, Accountability Act, for example, puts in place strict at a minimum, productivity, collaboration, analytics, access and audit requirements for organizations and application development. handling personal health data, and there’s been How valuable are these? It’s hard to measure, much debate about whether cloud computing pro- but here’s some food for thought: How would you viders meet them. feel if your main competitors started pulling away Similarly, the EU prohibits consumers’ data from from you in those areas simply by changing their being transferred to countries outside it without prior computing infrastructure? And how much worse consent and approval. Companies outside the EU can would it be if this change created other benefits overcome this restriction by demonstrating that they that are not yet obvious? One common feature of provide a “safe harbor” for data. Some countries, like major technological shifts is that their full effects Germany, however, have even more-restrictive data are not visible at first. For example, it was incon- export laws, and it’s not yet clear if the safe harbor ceivable at the dawn of factory electrification that process will satisfy them. a separate motor might one day be placed on every Such considerations mean that it often won’t machine in the plant, yet this is exactly what even- suffice for cloud computing customers or suppli- tually happened. ers to blithely say, “The data’s in the cloud some- As the cloud grows and matures, its vendors will where; we don’t know exactly where.” Enterprise continue to innovate and to differentiate their of- cloud vendors are aware of this and are working to ferings. The results may not be as transformative as modify their offerings so that, for example, they those from factory electrification, but I predict that can assure customers and regulators that a specific they’ll lead to corporate computing environments body of data is being stored in one location and no- very different from the ones in place today. The only where else. way to learn about them firsthand is to start moving But for now, current and potential cloud custom- into the cloud. ers need to get as much clarity as possible on the le- HBR Reprint R1111J

8 Harvard Business Review November 2011 SPONSOR’S PERSPECTIVE Defining Your Path to the Cloud

An Interview with Sameer Dholakia, Group Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Platforms Group, Citrix

Q The cloud is completely revolutionizing adopting cloud computing are those that have key areas will help ensure success. First, it’s IT and we see tremendous interest by reinvented IT process and operations in order important for an organization to assess the enterprises. What do you think are some of to achieve the full benefits of the cloud. business problems they are trying to solve the key business drivers that are driving this before developing a cloud strategy. Second, interest? Q Many organizations have already made we believe that the best path to the cloud significant investments in their datacenter. is to be surgical, to start with very specific A In talking with our customers — both How can those organizations take advantage workloads and use cases that can benefit from large and small, and from a broad range of of the cloud? the characteristics of the cloud. We find many industries, it is amazing how cloud computing customers are looking to address specific has really captured the attention of enterprises A This is a question I often hear as organizations issues, such as “I want my engineers in Dev/ because there are benefits to be reaped by just are really trying to maximize the return on Test to have ready access to the infrastructure about everyone in the organization. Business their existing investments. They don’t want they need to their job” or “I want to deliver groups can benefit from faster time to market to hear that they need to buy tons of new Windows apps and desktops from a cloud scale and decreased CapEx and Opex, IT can improve hardware to get the benefits of the cloud. The environment” or “I want marketing to be able the way services are delivered, thereby gaining great thing about the cloud is that it leverages to execute a website campaign in a matter of speed and agility, and employees, customers existing compute, storage, networking and hours or days, and not be bottlenecked by and partners can gain self-service access to on- virtualization resources as key enablers of IT.” Understanding the business requirement, demand resources. All of these benefits: speed, cloud infrastructure and services. This means designing a solution with the requirement agility, and reduced costs, are something that that customers can use the hardware they have in mind is extremely critical, as a successful all organizations desire and we really see these today to start building their own cloud. workload in the cloud will pave the way for drivers influencing the demand for cloud. And although virtualization on its own is not a additional use cases to fully advantage of all of cloud, organizations that have made extensive the benefits of the cloud. Q We also know that the cloud can introduce use of it have already taken a significant first new challenges. What should customers be step towards an enterprise cloud computing Finally, understand the various deployment aware of as they begin to look at potential strategy. With Citrix solutions, the platform models available. You can build your own on- cloud computing strategies? is designed to be open and supports any premise cloud environment, adopt external The cloud is a massive transformation that can hypervisor, giving our customers the ability to cloud services from a trusted provider, or be a complete paradigm shift from existing deploy a cloud with reduced financial impact leverage both to achieve your specific business IT strategy and infrastructure. Cloud may and faster time to market. and IT goals. require IT to develop additional skills in order This is just the beginning of what will be a Q How should an organization proceed to think of resources, not individually, but as massive transformation. The cloud is real and with the cloud? Any best practices you pooled. Instead of IT receiving requests for is being adopted across every vertical, in every can share? new resources, users self-provision. This is a corner of the globe. Don’t wait, partner with a fundamental change in how people do their A Many of our customers are looking for company like Citrix who has proven experience work and requires the full support of IT. The guidance on where to start with their cloud and has helped hundreds of companies deploy organizations that we see are successful in strategy and we believe focusing on a few clouds in production.

Citrix transforms how businesses and IT work and people collaborate in the cloud era. With market-leading cloud, collaboration, networking and virtualization technologies, Citrix powers mobile workstyles and cloud services, making complex enterprise IT simpler and more accessible for 260,000 organizations. Citrix products touch 75 percent of Internet users each day and it partners with more than 10,000 companies in 100 countries. Learn more at www.citrix.com.