Ovum: Cloud governance must improve

Cloud computing

Cloud computing governance needs to pull it socks up for the technology to reach its full potential.

This was the finding of analyst firm Ovum, which claimed in a new report the technology was suffering from a lack of management and could not thrive without better co-ordination.

Laurent Lachal, senior analyst at Ovum and author of the report, said in a statement: "Despite growing interest in IT transitioning from managing technology to providing technology as a service, neither business nor IT executives have been particularly proactive in managing the various changes that such a transition requires at all levels."

He claimed governance for the cloud is even more difficult than other areas of IT and where it is still early days, companies should ensure a push towards flexibility for the technology.

"Public as well as private clouds' ability to make it faster and easier to procure, develop, deploy and hardware and software assets will make the biggest difference," Lachal added.

He also claimed there should not be the usual management focus on keeping control of what employees do but instead be about encouragement to embrace cloud computing.

The report concluded that although there is an impending need for this management to be implemented it will be a slow process rather than a "big bang implementation."

Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.