This is a guest video post by Pankaj Arora, senior manager in the Global Strategic Initiatives team, Microsoft IT. See his prior post about the new book, “To the Cloud: Cloud Powering an Enterprise.”Once you have envisioned the ways your organization can benefit from using cloud computing, the next step is to decide how exactly to move forward.In the video below, I sit down with co-author Salil Dave to talk about important considerations and practices to enable cloud computing in an enterprise. Our discussion draws on our experiences within Microsoft IT, and experiences from the many enterprise customers we’ve met. In the video we touch on different topics including approaches to cloud adoption, selecting a service provider, investing in training, and cloud governance. At the end of the video we also discuss the DevOps model, in which there is tighter integration between development and operations. In DevOps, there is often more fluid communication and more freq...

This is a guest post by Bob Anderson, senior director for IT Business Value Evangelism in the Global Strategic Initiatives team, Microsoft IT. Like many of you who lead and work in IT departments, the leadership team within Microsoft IT regularly reflects on what we do and how we do IT. It’s ...

Tony Scott, corporate vice president and CIO at Microsoft, talks about the role of cloud computing in emerging markets and provides some recommendations to CIOs based on material from the book, To the Cloud: cloud-powering an enterprise.

I travel the globe speaking with a lot of CIOs, sharing best practices and learning what’s new. They tell me there has been a change in the importance of their relationship with the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Today’s consumers want real-time access to companies. They want a rich dialog and immediate access to products and services. And they want this primarily online. This ‘digitization of business’ creates new dependencies at all levels of an organization. CIOs are no longer hidden deep within the infrastructure of an organization. We are more visible in the Board Room and are becoming an important consideration in how a company interacts with its customers.At the Microsoft U.S. CIO Summit, I discussed one of these new dependencies, between the CIO and the CMO with Chris Capossela, chief marketing officer at Microsoft. We spoke about the increasing collaboration and dependence between IT and marketing here at Microsoft, which is reflected in other companie...

Innovation is at the heart of business growth—accelerating speed to market, improving and developing business processes, partnering with business groups to develop new products/services, creating more customer value, and increasing profitability. But how can CIOs play a larger role in innovati...

This is a guest video post by Pankaj Arora, senior manager in the Global Strategic Initiatives team, Microsoft IT. See his prior post about the new book, “To the Cloud: Cloud Powering an Enterprise.”Once you have envisioned the ways your organization can benefit from using cloud computi...