Cloud computing is more mainstream today than ever before, but it's important to note that there are still significant opportunities for IT leaders to innovate and leverage cloud delivery options to capture new business opportunities and implement new IT models.

The Evolution of ITaaS: The Convergence of Two Roads

On one hand, traditional private cloud services within customer IT services are driving different degrees of completeness depending on organizational needs. Virtualization, consolidation and on-premise shared services are some of the drivers within the private cloud space.

On the other hand, public cloud services are evolving to include Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Today, these two tracks are intersecting to create demand for a hybrid cloud model. While the concept of the "Hybrid" cloud has developed mostly as a consequence of the availability of different cloud services, this same availability is also driving the evolution of IT as a Service.

What does this mean for business? It means that fundamentally, IT is adopting a supply chain management logic by deciding whether to make or buy a specific service based on a variety of organizational goals, market pressures, and available options.

The Ongoing IT Sourcing Strategy: Make vs. Buy 

As IT embrace the ITaaS model, the issue of whether to make or buy are evaluated on a strategic basis.

The decision to make or buy is based on each service -such as supply chain management or reporting -and how that decision is made is going to reflect the maturity of the organization. Some organizations are making opportunistic decisions and some are approaching this haphazardly. Few organizations at this point are making strategic decisions. It is becoming apparent that IT groups that do not build a strategy will be increasingly under pressure and some of them will crumble. We need a wake-up call for IT.

To this extent, organizations should weigh five components when determining when to make or buy:

1. Value add
2. Cost
3. Time to deploy
4. Risk profile
5. Experience

As organizations evaluate the criteria of whether to make or buy, it's important that IT planning involve stakeholders from various lines of business. Organizational leaders need to understand the business outcome of a service that IT is expected to deploy. And IT leaders will be required to help drive this shift in thinking. It's not about the application; it's about the business outcome. IT leaders

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