Even with all the hype surrounding Cloud Computing, a recent Forrester study shows that only 6% of enterprises have a successful private Cloud deployment. CloudNOW sat down with Vanessa Alvarez, named by Femmeonomics as one of the 50 women to watch in Tech, a well-respected industry analyst for data storage and cloud computing and a member of the CloudNOW advisory board, to talk about the trends and challenges in the cloud computing space and what is really holding enterprises back.

Vanessa notes that "most organizations today are going into Cloud not as well prepared as they should be". While there are a number of externalities such as lack of standardization, key reasons for failure are often internal to the organization such as lack of clarity on why cloud needs to be leveraged or the lack of communication between CXOs, IT and business staff on the reasons for change. These gaps in clarity and communication often lead to "roadblocks along the cloud journey because not everyone was on board".

Thus Vanessa emphasizes that "organizations should be prepared from a people, process and technology perspective and understand why they are looking to leverage Cloud, whether a private cloud or public cloud". And even though cloud technology is evolving at a rapid pace, changing technology is not the challenge but rather changing people and process is in order to have a successful cloud environment.

Along those lines, Vanessa sees an "evolution of IT organization from maintaining and managing infrastructure to becoming a business that understands where IT resources should be leveraged from" over the next 12 to 18 months because "it is not about speeds and feeds but more about how can IT contribute to the business bottom line". As a result, new functions and responsibilities will emerge that which will necessitate not only technical skills but also business acumen. And "with the right Vision, Plan and Focus successful execution is inevitable".

The full interview with Vanessa can be read here, on the CloudNOW site.

by Seema Jethani / Lori MacVittie