To cloud or not to cloud
This post was also published in the Wall Street Journal's CIO Journal. Cloud is all the rage in IT right now, offering nearly instantaneous time to value, continual feature upgrades, and reduced cost. However, it is important to delineate different types of cloud offerings and what should and shouldn’t run in the cloud. There are also several contractual issues CIOs should consider when dealing with cloud vendor. Software-as-a-Service is mainstream and cost-effective Among the very first cloud offerings, software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions such as Salesforce.com Inc. and ServiceNow Inc. are very compelling. The offerings are completely self-contained, turnkey and offer rich feature sets that are continually enhanced and refined by the vendor. Often SaaS vendors integrate with each other which makes it easier to piece a stack of software together. When selecting a SaaS vendor, CIOs should ensure that the vendor has a high standard of data security and offers an interface b