Lessons Learned: How to Leverage Cloud-Based Business Models

This Irish proverb states a truth that rings no truer than in the current digital technological landscape characterized by rapid fluctuation and turbulence. It is a landscape where a multitude of new and incumbent IT organizations are attempting to embrace and leverage emerging technological advancements. One such nascent technological development is cloud computing. Cloud computing enables IT service providers (ITSPs) to virtualize their computational resources and concurrently provision them, via a service orchestration process, typically in the form of software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and more recently, anything as a service (XaaS). However, evidence suggests that incumbent organizations attempts to leverage the business model payoffs of cloud technologies are proving difficult. For larger organizations to derive cloud-related business model payoffs, they often must challenge assumptions that cloud computing always and easily provides benefits and cultivate their own pathways to cloud success. This Executive Update describes nine specific workarounds that two global, multinational ITSPs used in their endeavors to reap the payoffs of cloud-based business models. We present these workarounds as key lessons learned from an in-depth study of these two organizations.