Business Technology Roundtable

We live in a more connected and fast-moving world than ever before. Small business start-ups overtake established incumbents to dominate their markets with increasing speed. Developing countries leapfrog massive landline telecom investments and jump straight to mobile communications. While our growing interconnectedness brings many benefits, it also sometimes means greater vulnerability and a heightened sensitivity to risk. Increasingly we look to enabling technology to support both our personal and professional lives. As individuals, we expect instantaneous and ubiquitous access to communications, data, content, and applications. We increasingly look to social media to inform our personal and business decisions. As business leaders, we expect technology to deliver cost efficiencies, improve customer experience, drive revenue growth, and foster innovation. At the same time, we expect constant availability and end-to-end security. Evolving Beyond the Legacy IT Models This combi

Once again, we return to the topic of managed cloud services lessons-learned, and the associated best practices that have been gleaned by the early-adopters. The need for agile organizations and adaptive business processes continues to fuel demand for alternatives to the legacy IT status-quo. According to the latest market assessment by IDC , cloud computing is being adopted more widely for a larger portfolio of business applications, as IT and business leaders discover what works well -- and what doesn't work so well. The active ingredients for cloud enablement are: just-in-time software stacks that are ready to provision, on-demand deployments, a self-service catalog of cloud services, the scalability to meet growing demand for computing resource and the flexibility to scale down resources -- when they're no longer needed by the user. Cloud computing uses still focus primarily on public cloud services, with the early adopters leveraging cloud computing for application