Increasing Functional Specificity over Increasingly Commoditized Hardware - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 4

be observed that have impact on company requirements upon Information
Technology (IT) support:
1. Striving toward high agility
2. Globalization of activities to be able to take advantage of opportuni-
ties provided by a global economy
3. Increased mobility
In dynamic business environments, agility is considered the key success
factor for companies. Only companies with high agility can be successful
in today's rapidly changing business environments. In literature, there are
various definitions for the term agility : from general ones, for example, “the
ability of firms to sense environmental change and respond readily,” to more
specific ones, for example, “…an innovative response to an unpredictable
change.” Business agility is the ability to sense highly uncertain external
and internal changes and respond to them reactively or proactively, based
on innovation of the internal operational processes, involving the customers
in exploration and exploitation activities while leveraging the capabilities
of partners in the business network. Business agility is therefore the ability
to swiftly and easily change businesses and business processes beyond the
normal level of flexibility to effectively manage unpredictable external and
internal changes (see Section 22.1, “Agile Enterprises”).
One basic obstacle for achieving agility is the prevailing IT infrastructure
of enterprises. Despite efforts to increase flexibility of corporate IT, most pre-
vailing corporate IT still involves hardwired processes and applications that
cannot be changed quickly and easily. This results in long lead times before
the IT infrastructure can follow and support new business process and prod-
uct concepts. Thus, an agile company is only possible with an agile IT infra-
structure that can quickly and efficiently be adjusted to new business ideas.
Enterprises would like to have an IT infrastructure that can realign itself
expeditiously to new business priorities. They require rapid and predictable
turnaround times for provisioning computing power, storage, information,
and application flows. Virtualization of resources (computers and data) and
their flexible integration and combination to support changing business con-
cepts has the potential to increase IT and business agility in companies (see
Section 15.2, “Types of Virtualization”).
Another development trend affecting the requirements upon the IT
infrastructure in companies is the increasing globalization of companies.
Companies are increasingly acting as global companies with activities
spread over many locations worldwide. The globalization of companies
resulted in globalization of their IT. To support the activities of remote com-
pany parts, IT resources and data as well as data centers are also scattered
worldwide. Despite the global spread of activities, companies strive to use
the competitive advantage of the involved regions in a synergetic way and
to create a Global One Company . Thus, there is a growing need for IT support