Almost from the beginning of widespread adoption of computers, organizations realized that disaster recovery was a necessary component of their information technology (IT) plans. Business data had to be backed up, and key processes like order entry, billing, payroll and procurement needed to continue even if an organization’s data center was disabled due to a disaster. Over time, two distinct disaster recovery models emerged: dedicated and shared. Although both of these approaches were effective, they often forced organizations to choose between cost and speed.

The pressure for organizations, in the public or private sector, to reduce costs is constant. At the same time, organizations have to remain or improve user productivity in all their departments to stay competitive. This is even further magnified during a recovering economy as organizations face challenges of sustaining or growing revenue from customers or even government. Management and shareholders are always on the lookout to reduce their expenses. Innovative technology is one area where companies can look into to help to lower expenses with efficiency gains. Specifically with respect to technology, many companies are taking advantage of the cloud to help with reducing expenditures while simultaneously improving productivity.

Cloud will be part of your organisation’s future, regardless of your company size, your current distribution of workloads across various deployment types, or your current position on the viability of cloud services. Although the risk of leading a potentially unsuccessful cloud initiative may seem too great, the risk of pushing back and not advancing your organisation to embrace the cloud is even greater. IT teams that aren’t developing cloud environments and cloud skillsets today may soon find themselves outdated and of less value to the organisation. Now is the time to start making that transformation to ensure longer-term success for your company and your IT organisation. The challenges are determining how to incorporate cloud into strategic plans and managing risk while ramping up experience on the team. Looking at typical enterprise cloud road maps, Forrester finds that an internally based private cloud is a popular approach, but many struggle with setting up this new environment in a way that maximises benefits and positions these organisations for the customer-focused IT future.

The rise of managed hosting and the cloud have sparked much speculation among IT professionals. Do these help or hurt IT job prospects? Are IT departments in danger of being shut down? How can IT cope with these new trends? It's an emotional debate, with no firm statistics to settle it. For example, figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics do show a 10 year decline in full-time employees in the "information" and "data processing" sectors, but these numbers are not granular enough to answer these questions.

Cloud Computing is a paradigm shift that sees the dawn of a new age of computing driven by distinct benefits. Given the undeniable value to be gained from a move to Cloud Computing, it is hardly surprising that many organizations are contemplating a shift "to the Clouds". Experience has shown however that organizations are concerned around the logistics of the move and worried about unintended consequences and problems.