The fact that vendors of cloud services and SaaS tools are seducing business managers into violating corporate policies by signing their own IT contracts is a governance issue that Boards need to stamp on before somebody takes their company down. And in the meantime IT needs to do some serious discovery and policing. These maverick business units are like children who have run away from home: you need to find them fast and keep them alive until you can get them back home safe behind locked doors.
Or another issue: some companies will of course embrace the fact that users communicate on channels outside the company so their is nothing to subpoena, but others are of course tearing their hair out over the security nightmare this presents (there’s a reason so many companies stuck to Blackberry for so long). Yup, that’s an issue.
Another issue is that cloud services and virtualisation are transforming how we manage IT infrastructure. In future, the staff operating the infrastructure will spend less time trolling logs and tweaking configurations, and more time integrating third-party services, managing service contracts, planning future capacity, and strategising availability. Most of them are hopelessly underskilled for this. We have a people problem in IT ops.
