It’s the time of year to give those special people in your life a little gift, so why not fulfil some CIO wishes and give them what they want.

Whether they ask for a physical on premise stocking or a virtual stocking to hold their gifts, let’s make their lives a little easier.

 

1. Converged infrastructure

It might be useful to have multiple cloud providers and plenty of services rolling out in the cloud, but having disparate infrastructure elements can be a pain.

Making it more agile and cost-effective will help to break down silos that limit agility and succeed only in increasing costs and complexity.

 

2. Clear pricing

Cloud companies are starting to address this issue; companies like AWS have introduced a Price List API, to better monitor pricing.

However, it remains difficult to judge how much it will cost you to scale up your use of cloud, $0.035 may sound cheap to start but how much is the price when you massive scale it?

A probe into cloud storage providers over consumer prices is underway; a move to clear pricing is required.

 

3. More cloud, more money

Cloud adoption is certainly on the rise, a quick look at any of the major analyst firms like Gartner will highlight this fact.

But this does not mean that companies are necessarily ‘all in’ when it comes to cloud. Simply having a line of business that is using a cloud service does not make you a cloud company.

So it’s time to scale up those deployments, you’ve tested the water and it feels nice. The CIO can safely decide that it’s time to throw the kitchen sink into the cloud.

 

4. More security

A host of major public cloud companies such as Box have numerous amounts of security accreditations, but not all do.

The CIO will no doubt be wishing to appease those in the organisation that want greater agility with a public cloud service, but it can only be trusted if the cloud vendor has proven themselves to be trustworthy.

 

5. An end to negative messaging

Is cloud the right decision? Possibly not for everything, but for a large amount of services it probably is.

So when you’re trying to make a decision on this, it doesn’t help to have negative messaging out there that damages the potential company-wide adoption of cloud services.

The problem has been raised by companies such as AWS, typically related to security. CIOs may well be wishing for a more independent view on what’s good and what isn’t.

 

6. No more shadow IT

The business should understand that you want more agility, a faster time to resources and all these things, but circumventing IT for services isn’t the way to go.

This links with point nine, but it’s time to stop giving the CIO a headache and start going through the proper channels to get what you need.

Don’t make the CIO wonder why they have 20 of the same cloud service on 20 different credit cards throughout the business. No more complexity and no more shadow IT.

 

7. 100% uptime

So, you’ve persuaded your business to migrate some of your mission-critical operations to a cloud provider, the last thing you want is an outage.

This year has seen a number of brown outs for most of the major cloud providers and while many can claim to have near perfect availability, even the slightest hint of an outage for critical systems can be costly.

This may be something that CIOs wish for on a daily basis, but please no more cloud outages.

 

8. 24/7 managed services

Tie in with 24/7 managed services a cloud management portal that helps your business to see what cloud services are running and where.

This will help to take the stress off the CIO and IT department and give instant visibility across all your cloud landscape.

Governance and performance can be greatly improved.

 

9. Better integration

We’ve covered converged infrastructure in the first point, where a better integration of services will save money.

What this is related to, is better connectivity between the CIO and business.

Bernd Leukert, Member of the Executive Board, SAP SE, said: "If the gap remains then they will become obsolete."

Poor lines of communication between the business and CIO mean that neither can function effectively.

It’s time to wish for better collaboration.

 

10. Better support – SLAs

Support shouldn’t be restricted to the deployment of your cloud service and only that.

As businesses move more operations into the cloud, they want to be safe and secure in knowing that they are going about it in the right way. Who better to get support from than the cloud provider?

Of course there are third parties out there that can help as well, so don’t discount them.

When something serious goes wrong, CIOs want to know there is a reliable source to go to.