and pollutions to the environment and air. With cloud technology, resource utilization
can be improved, energy and resource consumptions can be reduced, and
environmental protection can be achieved.
It is no surprise that readers of this book are familiar with the applauses and discussions on
cloud computing. With the maturing cloud technologies and increasing market penetration,
more enterprises and organizations will recognize the opportunities and benefits of cloud
technology and will be anxious to embark on the cloud trend. However, like many things in
real life, there are pros and cons. The maturing part of cloud applications can create various
degrees of advantages, but there are areas that are relative immature. Early adopters of
cloud believe that cloud services can be built on the existing business processes without
dramatic changes to their IT infrastructure. In practice, these enterprises are often faced with
over-budget or integration issues due to their misunderstanding. Unlike a single product or
software that can be purchased and deployed within an organization, enterprises using
cloud services need to fundamentally change their concepts on procurement, management,
and utilization of cloud services in order to truly lower the costs and reduce complexity.
As time goes by, most modern enterprises recognize that the introduction of cloud services
involve new operation process design, and the inclusion of the costs on IT management,
system integration, and IT infrastructure deployment. Also, enterprises and organizations
oftentimes under-estimated the complexity of interfacing with multiple cloud service
providers. When they introduce cloud services, different operation processes via different
vendors are used. Since the interface standards for cloud services are still at an infant stage,
this creates the complexity of inter-platform communication. Thus, enterprises and
organization would take the route of outsourcing or share cloud services to lower their costs.
In the past, security was a top concern of cloud computing, however, the KPMG survey
indicated that the importance of intellectual property and introduction costs are surfacing to
the top of the list. Security related topics include legal and regulatory issues, system
availability and business continuity risks. Other issues of great concern to CEOs include
data loss, privacy leakage, and intellectual property plagiarism.
While the Chief Information Officer (CIO) is thinking about how to respond to the rapid
changes of the needs of the enterprises, as well as the enterprise required IT services that
can be offered via the service platform on a cloud infrastructure, the consideration of aligning
services to meet the needs of the clients with the enterprise or organization is unchanged.
The importance of IT governance and IT Service Management (ITSM) will not be changed
with the changes in how the services are offered. As a result, the introduction of the
framework or solutions of IT governance and ITSM, to support the operation of cloud
