Taming the Cloud Beast Together

The cloud presents a world of opportunities for enterprises, but for many of them, the cloud becomes a wild beast – powerful yet raging out of control, struggling to lead the enterprise to its intended goals. 

“We spoke to CIOs and business leaders,” says Simon Ratcliffe, Principal Consultant for Ensono, “The CIOs say, ‘Yeah we’re in the cloud.’” This is symptomatic of a key challenge with cloud transformation – a disconnect between the CIO and CEO to remaining fears around strategy, goals, security and loss of control. 

That disconnect points to differing priorities between the CIO and business leaders, and a lack of mutual ownership of business and technology initiatives. This is a significant stumbling block. The CIO and CEO must be in full alignment when conceiving a cloud migration plan, the priorities, and the sequence of actions.

Using insights from both the CIF Digital Transformation Study and IDC’s State of the CIO 2018, this white paper lays out some key foundations for a vital CEO-CIO partnership for success in achieving business goals and recommends key steps CIOs can take to enable this partnership. 

The Digital Transformation Study was commissioned and executed in partnership with Ensono by the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), an industry body that champions and advocates the adoption and use of Cloud-based services by businesses and individuals.