Today’s CIOs are facing an evolving set of priorities and challenges. They need to deliver strategic value to the enterprise, and often this means ensuring the organization can react quickly – at the “speed of business” – and stay relevant. But the reality is that 78% of budgets are consumed by infrastructure and essential software, leaving only 21% available for new strategic initiatives. (1)

Further compounding the challenge is the fact that 17% of IT spend is on shadow IT products. (2) Cloud applications make the procurement, implementation and management of technology more manageable for non-technologists. This means it’s easier than ever for IT’s customers – the employees – to bypass them. In fact, a recent poll showed that 28% of employees admit to going around IT to implement applications.

But even though the cloud is creating management challenges thanks to the increasing prevalence of rogue implementations, the cloud – along with outsourced data centers – is an essential element of a CIO’s innovation and agility strategy.

Hybrid service delivery has become mainstream and the use of multiple cloud services will continue to increase, with only core applications remaining insourced. We’re seeing a growth in the use of third-party data centers and IT’s role will evolve to become a broker and integrator of cloud services – IT as a Service Bureau (ITaaSB).

This transformation will drive reconsideration of the network. CIOs will be responsible for providing access to multiple data centers and/or cloud platforms. They’ll need to support rapidly scaling bandwidth requirements while at the same time managing security and data control – all while meeting application performance SLAs. In this environment, there’s simply no room for application performance problems resulting from unpredictable throughput and latency.

Ultimately, a cloud enablement strategy is about connecting users to applications. Today, that means:

• Providing elastic scalable connectivity to enterprise and third-party data centers
• Enabling on-net connectivity via physical and virtual cross-connects to leading cloud providers
• Managing long-tail cloud through SaaS exchange providers

(1) Whalen, Meredith; IDC: “Creating the Technology-Imbued Business;” (June 2013)

(2) Ibid.