CIOIN

Avneesh Saxena, group vice president, Domain Research Group, IDC Asia Pacific, predicts the rise of a sourcing specialist who will act as a trusted advisor on the cloud for CIOs.

"If they [CIOs] are serious about cloud adoption they should start thinking about this," says Saxena.

The sourcing specialist will work closely with the CIO and the IT department, advising them on issues around the use of cloud services, says Saxena at the recent Intel APAC Cloud Summit in Penang.

They will specialise in setting up SLAs and making sure systems are not compromised as the organisation uses cloud services. Saxena says today's SLAs could be related to service agreements of not having IT go down.

But as companies use cloud services, some of the issues in these SLAs include regulations, hacking, sensitive information leaking out and having strong non-disclosure agreements.

"They will evolve as the cloud matures," says Saxena. "It would be interesting if someone has the job of not just thinking about it [moving to the cloud], but also qualifying how and what applications should be put in the cloud, what type of cloud should we put them on."

"It is an interesting phenomenon, you will start to see some sourcing specialists starting to do this," he says. IT vendors providing cloud services "will have one more person to deal with in the future".