A comment I heard a few weeks ago made me chuckle: “We don’t use any cloud services in our organization.” Yeah…right. The reality of most organizations is that cloud services are being sponsored by business teams and often times without IT involvement or awareness. This highlights both the significant advantages of cloud services (e.g., low initial costs, ease of deployment, speed to market) as well as current issues (e.g., a wild-wild-west of application deployment, lack of integration to existing technologies, lack of governance and adherence to corporate policies/standards).

It’s part of the never-ending struggle that IT departments face – “How do we provide the services that employees need, want, and demand, while protecting company data and doing so without significant budget increases for new projects. If you are trying to wrap your hands around this, you’re not alone. Every organization operates differently, but here is one way to start.

Identify the needs, wants, and demands for cloud (and other emerging technologies) services in the organization. A simple and semi-effective way (depending on your organization) of getting this information is to use a simple survey technique. This can be communicated a number of ways to gain traction in your organization – anything from “We’re evaluating potential new technologies and want your input on what to address” to “We have potential solutions for ____ and _____, but we need to know what you value most” to “We know you’re doing your own thing, so you might as well tell us what it is.”

Survey data can obviously give you a feel for what employees want to use, but there are some added side benefits too. One is the Big Brother effect. If you can show that you are aware of non-sponsored activity and are working toward sponsored solutions, employees are more likely to follow the rules and jump onboard your bandwagon. In some cases sponsoring a service may be as simple as approving a cloud service and setting up a process to provision and delete accounts via the standard corporate process. A second side benefit is the potential for identifying business sponsors and teaming to generate a solution. Assuming survey respondents have a good business case, they may just need IT to play an enabler role, since they see the service as a key business element.

Once you’ve compiled some “market data,” use the results to create the business cases for cloud / emerging technologies services, establish projects to evaluate and deploy solutions and prioritize project efforts.

As services start to deploy and become available, make the releases visible events and create a Service Catalog. This could be as simple as an email communication / newsletter, but it should try to portray some excitement. Think of it as advertising a new product to the market – after all, you just spent all this time and effort to prepare a service, so you’d hate to have a lousy acceptance rate. The Service Catalog can help end-users to see what’s available, what’s in-progress (if you post that information), and provide input/suggestions for new services.

This is all fine and dandy, but you’ll still need to have some information security basics covered to make this effective. The provisioning and account management processes must be somewhat mature, and the information security department must have some level of authority to enforce business users to use only corporate-sponsored tools.

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