Executive's Guide to IT Governance: Improving Systems Processes with Service Management, COBIT, and ITIL

CHAPTER NINE

Cloud Computing, Virtualization, and Portable, Mobility Computing

THE WORLD OF IT SYSTEMS is constantly filled with ever-evolving new technologies and concepts. Some of these are IT concepts and changes that quickly become common accepted practices. The Internet language Java is an example of such a newer technology. Applications using Java have become a vehicle allowing communication between central Internet sites and individual systems, and Java has become an Internet development standard. Many other newer technologies, however, initially received much publicity in various IT publications but did not establish much of a position in the marketplace and were soon forgotten. In the end, they were “not that big of a deal” as IT consumers and the market overlooked them or competitors came up with better offerings.

Some newer technologies have been with us for quite a while now, and are only really new when compared to traditional IT systems and processes. These technologies change the way we think of building and managing IT systems and their supporting processes. This chapter will look at three such newer technologies that are becoming increasingly common in IT operations today, where each also presents some IT governance issues.

First we will discuss what has become known as cloud computing, a concept that relates to our use of the Internet and the World Wide Web since the late 1990s. Professionals today use an Internet search tool such as Google to seek answers to ...