White Papers: BMC

Like many IT executives, you might be considering cloud computing as a way to costeffectively deliver IT services to the business. You’re not alone. IDC predicts that revenue from IT cloud services will grow from $17.4 billion in 2009 to $44.2 billion in 2013; this is a five-year annual growth rate of 26 percent, which is more than six times the rate of traditional IT offerings.1 (These figures do not include spending for private cloud deployments. They only include information for public IT cloud services offerings.) While cloud service providers are poised to reap these forecasted revenues, enterprise IT organizations also anticipate financial advantages from cloud computing.

Cloud computing is a major departure from the traditional IT service delivery model. Services are no longer tied to dedicated hardware silos. Instead, virtualized resources — servers, network devices, and storage — are abstracted from the hardware. They move freely about the infrastructure, delivering services when and where they are needed. But this doesn’t mean that you have to completely reinvent IT to implement cloud computing.