Will Google finally gain access to enterprise computing by becoming the datacenter?

Implications: 1.  Commodity computing is here and managing servers is not core to the business. 2.  Focus IT on solving business problems.

Analysis: One decision for a CIO is to determine what is core to running IT at your company and what is something that someone else could do better so you can focus your IT management on the key business challenges facing your company.  The question that the article suggests is will Google provide CIO's with another option?

Google has been doing a phenomenal job in providing advertising and other services to businesses, but has yet to make a huge impact in the IT enterprize environment.  As this article points out, this could change as more and more IT organizations look to outsource their compute farms.

Google has made some inroads into IT in the form of search engines.  But most of these solutions were only temporary and small relative to other vendors.  Google is still a small percentage of most IT budgets.

IT has had a long history of outsourcing their hardware operations.  And there are many companies who will manage your computers for you including IBM, EDS, and others.  It is conceivable that IT organizations could eventually leverage Google's global data centers.

More and more of employees are performing their work remotely and this trend will continue.  Having the data stored in the "cloud" actually makes it closer to the remote end users and would eliminate the need to train users on how to do VPN.  Security to the data could be managed by tokens which many companies employ.  So access to the data is not impossible.

Another advantage of storing the data in the cloud will be a reduction in complexity for the IT department.  Although virtualization has reduced the amount of wasted computing power, it has added an additional level of work to manage those virtualized servers.  Putting services in the cloud will reduce the amount of work on the IT team.

The challenges I see are the management of the data.  It is bad enough that we have data stored internally that no one knows if it should be kept, but in a services model, the data stored in the cloud will add costs.  Policies will have to be created to determine how the data is managed in the event of an employee leaving the company and also size limits will need to be imposed much like the in-house solutions.

What I most like about this idea is the potential to reduce some of my headaches that the business sees little value in.  I want to focus my energy getting into the key business meetings where I can improve the business and not managing my servers a little better.  Managed services have a potential to be easier to deliver to end users and let business owners choose what to purchase.  You could set up several options and charge the departments for the use of these applications or services.

This is good news that CIO's will have more choices to provide to the business.  This will give us the flexibility to provide a solution that best meets our company's needs.