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Every important new information technology follows a similar path on the journey from promising new innovation to mainstream business productivity tool.

There’s the “overhyped next-big-thing” phase, which is usually followed by an “emperor has no clothes” backlash. You can expect technology vendors to pass through a “hey, maybe I can sell more of that old solution with this new name” period, and business technology consumers to have their “if they’re using it, why aren’t we?” panic.

Eventually, the “measurable evidence of value” moment arrives which paves the way for companies to transition to the all-important “aligning implementation to business strategy” stage.

Cloud computing is moving along this path at remarkable speed, and with good reason.

As recently as 18 months ago, “the cloud” was just another bit of confusing techno-jargon for most people. Today, however, there’s little doubt that cloud computing is transforming the way people create, access and use information and computing capabilities. And it’s quickly becoming obvious that cloud-based solutions can help companies cut costs, respond to changing business conditions with greater flexibility, and speed time to market.

So, on the journey from breathless hype to strategic implementation, where is cloud computing right now?

Think of it as the “double-edged sword” stage. This is the moment when companies discover that along with the expected benefits, an innovative new technology sometimes introduces unanticipated risks. During this stage, it is often unclear what steps a company should take to strike the right balance between the two.

What is clear right now is that with evidence of the value of cloud computing coming into sharper relief, cloud-based technology has emerged as the number one IT focus for many businesses.

A new Avanade survey of 576 C-level executives, IT decision makers and business unit leaders at top companies in 18 countries shows just how important cloud computing has become to enterprises around the world. When asked to name their top three IT priorities for the coming year, more executives said cloud computing (60 percent) than any other IT issue, including security (58 percent) and IT consolidation (31 percent).

According to the survey, companies are looking to take advantage of cloud capabilities by increasing IT spending with an emphasis on solutions that help workers share information, streamline operations and understand customers. Companies are also taking steps to strengthen organizational expertise about cloud computing by expanding investments in employee training.

But while business leaders are hoping to embrace the benefits that cloud services promise, they are also anxious about the potential challenges. Chief among their concerns is the uncontrolled proliferation of public cloud services – a problem we call “cloud sprawl.”

According to the survey, 60 percent of executives are worried about the impact of unmanaged cloud services on their information infrastructure. One in five executives believes that it’s already impossible to manage the public cloud services that have crept into their organization.

The difficulty, of course, is that the very nature of public cloud services means there are few barriers to stop employees from simply using a credit card to self-provision a useful new capability. This has created a situation at some companies where entire departments have provisioned cloud services that fall outside the reach of IT governance, creating huge potential risks to the security of company and customer information. In some industries, unmanaged public cloud services also raise the specter of serious regulatory violations.

While nearly two-thirds of the companies surveyed have policies in place that prohibit employees from using unmanaged cloud services, the vast majority of respondents indicate there are no real ramifications for utilizing cloud services without going through proper IT channels. In fact, 20 percent of business leaders said they had purchased a cloud service themselves without approval from IT.

In any case, companies that rely on blanket prohibitions to cut off access will miss out on important employee-driven initiatives that innovative cloud services make possible. In the process they may lose important opportunities to more nimble competitors. Ultimately, this poses an even greater long-term danger than the current short-term risks that cloud sprawl presents.

Fortunately, there are steps that companies can take to manage cloud sprawl without sacrificing the opportunities that public cloud services can deliver.

The key is to begin by defining an employee-centric cloud strategy that recognizes the value that Web services can provide and that maps IT policies to business objectives. This will demonstrate to business users that IT is committed to unlocking the potential of cloud technology inside the enterprise and it will open the door to clear communication between the IT department and business leaders across the organization.

From there, it is important to conduct a comprehensive cloud audit to see how services are being used within the company and to identify not only potential vulnerabilities but also areas where cloud services are having a positive impact. This audit will provide the foundation for a migration roadmap for moving from cloud sprawl to alignment between business objectives and service deployment.

Next, it is critical to communicate company cloud policies and strategies clearly and concisely, with an emphasis on the positive benefits that cloud services bring to the organization.

Companies that follow these steps will give their IT department the flexibility to respond to employee needs and the tools to bring cloud sprawl under control. In the process, they will move their company from the stage where the cloud feels like a double-edged sword to something much more valuable –where a transformational technology begins to unlock dramatic improvements in productivity and opens the door to new ways of innovating and creating competitive advantage in a fast-changing marketplace.

Phil Evans, VP Sales for EMEA at Datacastle, examines the expanding market in data protection technology and the emerging issues driving this trend.

The implications of the latest Gartner predictions are clear: a string of user-empowering consumer-IT technologies are steadily loosening the modern organisation’s grip on its workforce practices and on its most sensitive data.

By 2012, 73% of the enterprise workforce will be mobile, and some 20% of companies will no longer own any IT assets, by 2013 80% of businesses will support a workforce using tablets and by 2014 almost all businesses will supply corporate data through smart-phone apps, as data migrates beyond office walls to the remote realms of virtual reality and cloud-services.

Gartner’s latest predictions conjure up images of a data-security nightmare, providing a porthole into a future digital workspace of informational chaos, with endlessly multiplying mobile endpoints, sensitive data handled on home laptops and mobile devices, a growing stream of unencrypted, unprotected user data on employee endpoints, i-workers” closing lucrative deals in Starbucks, remote boards thrashing out mergers in virtual meetings and corporate data flowing, unfettered, across public networks.

We know where these changes are coming from. The markets have shown for some time that the fixed PC endpoint is falling out of favour with the modern consumer, which means that, this year alone, 42 million tablets and 330 million new mobile devices will have been sold worldwide while the PC market continues to stagnate.

But as corporate IT is increasingly infiltrated by consumer trends, with mobile data storage replacing fixed endpoints, the implications for data security are potentially disastrous.

One recent report from the Ponemon Institute found that the average data breach incident cost UK organisations £1.9 million. And with the EU and Australia moving to enforce mandatory data-breach notification laws, the Financial Services Authority now flexing its punitive muscle and the ICO newly-armed with the power to impose crippling £500,000 fines on negligent organisations, data security is becoming a legal imperative.

But in a services economy where reputation is the biggest business asset, and a 24/7 media culture where mainstream news is increasingly converging with user-generated media content, it is the instantaneous effect of data breaches on reputation, and corresponding share price, that most concerns businesses.

The reputational cost of data breaches for global giants in today’s media environment was powerfully illustrated when Toshiba was recently hit by a massive data breach. The NHS recently compromised the medical records of £8.6 million patients after the loss of an unencrypted laptop, while just one missing BP laptop containing details of those affected by the recent oil-spill could cost the oil giant $2.78 million.

Meanwhile, for an estimated 80% of SME’s, who can least afford such losses, data breaches could lead to bankruptcy.

Spending on security solutions has massively increased, but many organisations are only adopting patchwork solutions. Of 160,000 laptops lost in Europe in 2010, 34% were encrypted, but only 26% were regularly backed up and many had no capacity for remote deletion. We also know that just 3% of lost devices are ever traced and many organisations no longer control which employees access sensitive data.

This demonstrates the urgent need in the channel for single disaster-recovery and policy-control solutions that can combine the functions of data backup, encryption, port-locking, remote data-policy control, remote deletion and device trace, through one central agent.

Consumerisation of IT

Because consumer IT is geared towards data consumption rather than data creation and user empowerment rather than data privacy, without the right security solutions it has the potential to open the floodgates to catastrophic corporate data-loss.

The personalisation of IT is now democratising corporate data, (in the same way user-generated digital media democratised news creation) with companies fast losing control of which tiers of employee access their data, or how sensitive information is communicated. The explosion in consumer IT, is spawning a new generation of digitally-empowered, hyper-connected workers who expect the flexibility to work both remotely or on-site to facilitate work/life balance, to freely share corporate data over public networks anywhere in the world at any time, select their own IT technology, and introduce everything from app-stores to social media into the workspace.

The business community stands at a fork in the road. A recent ITC report gives a glimpse of one possible future, outlining the lack of corporate device encryption and the explosive growth in unauthorised use of personal devices to access corporate data, with businesses openly admitting they are floundering in the face of the new trend, due to a lack of governance policies, no integrated solutions to control what happens to important data inside and outside office walls, and an absence of sufficient will among management teams to solve the problem. In this environment, it is no wonder many businesses are falling foul of regulators, when they are failing to even ensure compliance with their own data policies.

Yet rapid advances in encryption and cloud-based solutions mean that the technology to locally encrypt on the device, remotely store encrypted data and control access to existing data, or remotely delete and instantly restore lost data is already in existence for end points. Yet many businesses are not currently integrating all these solutions.

Datacastle RED (Resilient Endpoint Data) software, uniquely in the market, combines all these functions through a single policy-controlled agent. Critically, at a time when remote cloud-storage is a concern for many businesses, the RED policy-engine can be operated either in a Private Cloud or through a Public Cloud such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS as well as through partnerships with Authorised Service Provider cloud hosts in the UK, US, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Scandinavia.

As data breach becomes a hot-button issue in the media, portable devices increase data vulnerability, the number of endpoints continue to multiply and Governments tighten the law, the market in end point data security is set to explode.

Datacastle already deploys RED across 12 countries and multiple languages, but it is the adaption of this technology to mobile devices which may hold the key for the future control of data security. The extension of RED technology to the mobile market will, for the first time, consolidate data-control, backup, remote deletion, device trace and automatic at-rest encryption into a central agent operating with every endpoint, from tablet to PC, finally restoring corporate control over its remote data across the myriad devices and mobile workforces of the future.

Cloud Computing is here to stay, but what is driving growth in this area over the next 12-18 months?

Whether it’s saving costs, a need for more efficient IT processes or a desire for the latest technology upgrades, organisations are looking at options to become more agile in IT consumption and remove the expensive boxes in their computer rooms by outsourcing key IT services to third party providers. Vendors are beginning to make this transition easier by offering pay-as-you-go services from the cloud at an affordable monthly cost, which of course is enhancing their own profitability at the same time.

We’ll see this accelerate at pace over the next six months, with most vendors offering cloud based solutions that will enable organisations to make the transition. As confidence in the cloud model increases, and the benefits start becoming a reality, over the next 12 months organisations will start to use the cloud for more and more, well, for everything in fact; including the server, telephony services, CRM, desktop software licenses, line of business systems, accountancy services, email services and security.

The result – small businesses will no longer need a computer room because their network applications and services will be in the ‘cloud’; management and software costs will plummet. Completely scalable, the cloud will also enable them to increase or decrease their IT based on business requirements. Complex licensing will begin to be a thing of the past, as will static contracts tying you to systems that don’t adapt to changing business needs.

This complete transition to the cloud will revolutionise the IT department, freeing up resource from the daily, time intensive, tasks of making sure everything ticks over; instead allowing time to innovate and look at what technology can deliver the organisation to gain business knowledge, competitive advantage and get ahead of the curve.

And what about new products? Microsoft Office 365 and Lync are now entering the market. Combined, and hosted from a secure cloud platform, this will provide organisations with their tried and trusted business tools, tied together with extra integration and flexibility. Lync is especially exciting, bringing the telephone and video to your desktop, enabling users to see what other people are doing at any point in time, from any geographic location, and communicate in the most productive and appropriate way. It is the ultimate communication tool. Saving money on lengthy travel, as well as improving productivity, collaboration and time management, Office 365 and Lync will allow business transactions to happen significantly quicker. Unified Communications tools like this, supported by the cloud delivery model, is a great indicator of how the future of business technology is evolving.

Looking even further into the future (let’s say 2015), the make-up of a business workforce will be truly mobile. As smart phones and tablets penetrate the business more and more, most organisations will have an entirely mobile workforce. Working on smart devices, anytime and anywhere, that are linked to the network, and synchronised with social networking sites and the central collaboration server. Companies will be able to pull project teams together via Facebook or Twitter, without anyone needing to come back to the office – online collaboration will start to become the norm. It’s products like Office 365 with Lync and the maturing adoption of the cloud model that is taking us there – and beyond!

Engineering and technology corporation Metso and Fujitsu Services Oy have signed an agreement on IT infrastructure services for Metso's sites in Finland.

The contract, which was signed at the end of August, marks a continuation to a long-standing collaboration which dates as far back as the 1990's. The first Patja agreement that incorporated all Metso sites in Finland was sealed in summer 2003.

”We have been happy with the service. In particular, Fujitsu has succeeded in productising its service provision. Although key people have changed along the way the basic concept has proved strong and there has been no disruptions in the service,” says Vice President, Group IT Pauli Nuutinen of Metso.

The Patja service model, known as the 4114 service at Metso, provides end-to-end services for 8,000 workstation users at Metso's 60 sites in Finland.

Dell Inc is cautiously optimistic that its strong performance in Europe and Asia will continue, but is concerned about U.S. government spending, an executive said.

Steve Schuckenbrock, who runs the U.S. company's $8 billion services business, told Reuters it was yet to be seen whether a typical September spending surge as U.S. federal budgets close would happen this year.

"We're continuing to monitor demand big-time, as European issues, U.S. issues continue to get debated and discussed," Schuckenbrock said in an interview in London on Tuesday.

Accenture has announced that it has agreed with the U.S. Department of Justice to settle a lawsuit originally filed in 2006 (United States ex rel. Norman Rille and Neal Roberts v. Accenture LLP) for $63.68 million. The lawsuit claimed that, in work for the U.S. federal government, Accenture received payments, resale revenue or other benefits through alliance agreements with technology vendors that were not sufficiently disclosed and that were not allowed on federal contracts.

Accenture and the U.S. Department of Justice have agreed to settle the suit to avoid additional time, inconvenience and expense that would come with protracted litigation.

The agreement is not an admission of liability by Accenture. Accenture continues to vigorously deny that there was any wrongdoing. The U.S. federal government was aware of alliance relationships in the IT industry and how they would benefit customers, vendors and the IT industry. The details of how alliances worked in the IT industry were widely reported in the industry press.

Capgemini Norge AS, part of the Capgemini Group, one of the world’s foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services has been chosen as EnterCard’s partner to support their rapid growth ambitions.

EnterCard is a Nordic company that issues credit cards on behalf of partners, or under its own consumer brand. Capgemini will be the main provider for application maintenance and development services supporting EnterCard to more rapidly deliver new innovative products to the market.

Through the agreement Capgemini will provide end-to-end responsibility for application development and management including testing services. EnterCard has chosen Capgemini to consolidate the number of suppliers operating its central systems.

“EnterCard is growing rapidly and we are heavily focused on developing great propositions for our customers and partners. For us it is important to have an agile IT-partner that can match our market leading ambitions as the card industry develops and the needs of our customer are changing. To speed up the pace of development we have chosen Capgemini as the partner to help us continue our growth in the Nordic region” said Tord Topsholm, Operations Director for EnterCard.

GE and PSA Peugeot Citroen have signed an agreement that will potentially become one of the largest Electric Vehicle (EV) deals between a single corporate and a single Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) in Europe. The agreement, which was signed as a memorandum of understanding on September 14th in Frankfurt, involves the potential purchase of up to 1,000 EVs from PSA Peugeot Citroen, by GE Capital, which the company would offer to its customers at a pan-European level.

The agreement would see GE Capital lease EV vehicles across Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. GE Capital is a leading lessor of vehicles, with a customer fleet of approximately 250,000 vehicles in Europe, and 1.6 million globally. In July 2011, GE Capital announced the first European supply of EV Citroen C-Zero cars to technology giant, 3M. The PSA Peugeot Citroen move furthers GE Capital’s public commitment, made in November 2010, to purchase 25,000 electric vehicles globally by the year 2015.

“This is a landmark agreement and we are affirming our commitment to the future of electric vehicles and building on our strong relationship with European car manufacturers,” said Isabel Fernandez, CCO at GE Capital EMEA.

CSC has announced it has signed a ten-year contract with a U.S. based global multi-brand commercial products manufacturer to provide information technology (IT) and infrastructure managed services. The contract is a global 10 year agreement with an estimated value of more than $900 million and was effective on September 1, 2011.

By leveraging CSC’s expertise and global network of delivery centers, the new client expects to improve the overall efficiency and service level of its IT function.

Under the terms of the agreement, CSC will bring new innovative IT approaches covering a large scope of global infrastructure managed services, including: service desk, end user support services, network services, data center services, distributed computing services and security services.

“CSC and this new client have a common vision of what a world class IT function can bring to a large enterprise, and we are thrilled to be the IT partner of choice for such a successful and dynamic company,” said Michael W. Laphen, CSC chairman, president and chief executive officer. “CSC brings the right mix of expertise and innovation to this client that will reduce their overall cost and risk, elevate IT service levels and position them to more effectively capitalize on future growth opportunities.”

HP has abandoned plans to offshore the jobs of IT support staff working on the Adams 2 contract for the Department of Work and Pensions.

HP first revealed it was in talks to transfer some 200 roles based in north-east England to India to help it match the Government's demand to cut costs.

The move was met with obvious resistance from HP employees, the Public and Commercial Services Union and latterly local MPs, who highlighted the security implications of overseas workers managing a live database on 25 million citizens.