Find your cloud strategy in London

In a few short weeks’ time, team SUSE will be packing our bags and heading to London’s Docklands for the annual Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategy Summit. If you’ve not heard of or been to this event before, it’s full of infrastructure and operations professionals and executives all looking to hear about the latest ways of accelerating innovation and business agility, taking advantage of hybrid cloud technologies, and evolving security, as well as fitting in some quality networking. It’s a great event, with lots of interesting companies (like SUSE, for example) sponsoring, exhibiting and presenting, as well as many of the brightest and best from Gartner sharing their thoughts and latest research.

What’s your strategy?

One of the topics that is regularly discussed at the Gartner events is around creating and maintaining a cloud strategy. A cloud strategy should be a living document that sets out why you’re using the cloud, what applications you’re using it for, and not just set out which vendor you’ll be using. Just as your business continues to evolve, so should your cloud strategy to accompany it.

Cloud strategies should be a collaborative document – IT should work with the line of business teams to ensure their needs are part of this, to prevent the resurgence (or continued use) of Shadow IT. While Shadow IT has enabled many line of business teams to be able to react quickly to market changes and build revenue pipelines, it comes with a lack of control and governance that can be both dangerous and expensive. IT can and should be a service provider and broker to the whole business, delivering the services that are required, while ensuring they meet and maintain the relevant security and compliance standards.

I will be presenting alongside my colleague Imogen on Tuesday 26^th at 12:05 about this topic, where Imogen will be sharing some of her expert thoughts on the evolving role of the IT team, so we look forward to seeing many of you there.

If you’re at the summit, come along to the SUSE booth to hear more about this, to meet the team and to find out more about how open source solutions from SUSE can help your IT department to be that service provider and broker that your business needs.