Cloud computing is sweeping through the enterprise, giving rise to new challenges and opportunities that CIOs simply cannot afford to ignore. Steve Kenniston, an industry veteran best known for his personal blog The Storage Alchemist, appeared in the latest episode of SiliconANGLE’s Cube Conversations series to discuss the state of the market and the technologies to watch out for with Wikibon’s Stu Miniman.

As a line-of-business leader at IBM, Kenniston has his finger firmly on the pulse of customer trends. He observes that SMBs are increasingly moving non-mission critical processes to the cloud in a bid to reduce operational expenses, while enterprises are doing the same with dynamic workloads such as test and development systems to better keep up with user requirements and the speed of business. At the same time, some new companies opt to avoid building their own infrastructure altogether and simply rent IT resources from a provider on a pay-as-you-go-basis.

When, where & why cloud?

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“It very much depends on what staff you have and what objectives you have, as well as what applications” are being used, Miniman elaborates. He highlights that the scope and diversity of the cloud ecosystem are drawing in organizations of all sizes. “Anybody that’s got some kind of field force is probably leveraging Salesforce, [and] there’s many other services, companies like ServiceNow and Workday that are offering new services that are transformation a lot of businesses.” Even Amazon has entered the fray, moving beyond traditional IaaS with managed solutions like the WorkSpaces virtual desktop platform it introduced late last year.

Managing complexity

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The large variety of cloud services on the market gives CIOs the freedom to choose the offerings that best suit their requirements, but the extra flexibility comes at the cost of increased complexity. As Miniman notes, “One of the gaps I’ve seen is ‘I’ve got all of these pieces but as an IT organization, as a CIO, how do I manage all of those? Do I tie them all together or are they just all little pieces that I have to manage individually?’”

Ease of use is only one of the priorities with cloud. Kenniston points out that another major advantage is the ability to free up resources and person-hours that would normally be spent on maintenance for driving tangible business value. The same is true for Big Data, which he says holds the potential to even the playing field for small firms and foster competition. Exemplifying, the details that modern analytics tools have made it possible for banks to effectively detect fraud without having to make large-scale infrastructure investments and bring in specialized talent.

• Trustworthy storage

When it comes to storing data in the cloud, trust also becomes an important factor. Kenniston explains that “If I’m a CIO, and I’m thinking about who I’m gonna trust my external data to, obviously I probably want it to be someone like IBM or Amazon, someone who has a big name, who is spending money on the backend and taking my concerns as a CIO into consideration.”

Brand awareness is especially significant for companies that are just beginning their cloud journey. Kenniston advises organizations still in early stages of adoption to start out small, and take the time to understand the technical and economic advantages of leveraging the cloud in their use cases.

• First steps

“If you haven’t taken that first step into the cloud, I think you [should] pick an application your environment – data protection is a good one, whether it be backup or replication from a disaster recovery standpoint – you pick one of those and start to give it a try. You not only try it from a technology aspect, but you also start looking at it from a financial aspect,” he says.

The next step for the CIO is to survey the vendor landscape and identify opportunities to drive efficiencies in their organization. “Start to look at different companies or different things you can put into the cloud where it’s gonna be easier for you to run your backend business. If that’s a particular database, or a particular app, or if it’s test/dev. Then you look at companies that allow you to do that provisioning very easily and quickly,” Kenniston summarizes.