The cloud concept is based on a "pay by use" model. When you are not using it, you don't pay. It is defined by three major benefits of lowering costs, making IT agile and removing undifferentiated heavy lifting by off-loading data center operations. However, does the case of a private cloud deliver these benefits? If yes, then why is the concept getting slammed? 

A recent report by research firm Gartner says that the desire to share content and to access it on multiple devices will motivate consumers to start storing a third of their digital content in the cloud by 2016. Just 7 percent of consumer content was stored in the cloud in 2011, but this will grow to 36 percent in 2016.  

Cloud is a buzzword today and is hard to ignore. Most CISOs are skeptical about cloud because of data security concerns and some of them oppose it outright.I believe it is high time CISOs realize the change in technological advancement and interest of business. A good comfort level can be achieved by 'Follow the Data Model' approach. 

Cloud computing is not the next panacea for all the problems faced in the BPO industry, but it definitely gives one a lever to leverage the principles of the cloud and take it to the market place in a meaningful way to the end-customer. The model has helped us to drive efficiency in terms of creating more value for the end customer and improve effectiveness. 

Privacy of patient data is a high priority for us at most modern hospitals. To ensure that no unauthorized person gets access to patient medical records, we have rolled out a clear-cut responsibility matrix. Data privacy is one of the big reasons why we do not want to implement public cloud. We are not sure how secure the data will be in a public cloud environment. 

As Shriram Group is a large business conglomerate with diversified interests, it was quite a challenge for IT to manage separate servers for every company in the group. To consolidate and manage things better, we decided to implement private cloud in our data center six months back. The benefits include rapid deployment of applications and better resource utilization.  

The reason for implementing private cloud is to speed up our response to business requirements. With agility high on our agenda, we wanted to give the system to our users as soon as they needed it. Now we can do it within an hour, thereby reducing the turnaround time significantly. 

I am not an astrologer who predicts the future of a CIO or a CCO but it appears that the latter is a fit case to manage the adoption of cloud and future strategy in an enterprise. The CCO would have to ensure that his enterprise leverages every aspect of this technology resulting into a fundamental shift in thinking. 

As with just about any area, IT is a discipline to fads and memes, "received truths" that seem to arise in the blogosphere and then ricochet around the echo chamber until they sound plausible even to skeptics. One most often quoted is the much-repeated meme is "death of the CIO" with dreamy visions of the world brought to us by the consumerization of IT and the cloud.  

The cloud offers tangible boosts to productivity, flexibility, and scalability and does so while providing the means to reduce IT spend. Information security must not be the roadblock that prevents the adoption of such technology. By thinking ahead about the kinds of risks that outsourcing our systems will involve, we can be ready to quickly and securely lead our organization into the cloud.