A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo on CGI’s complete cloud approach. This is a great event to meet with senior IT leaders from all industries, such as healthcare, banking, education and all levels of the public sector, from federal civilian and defense agencies to state, provincial and local governments. It’s the type of event where you get a good pulse on the common challenges that all of these executives face no matter their sector.

The three common themes from these executives and Gartner were around mobility (all applications should now be accessible), social media (how to tap into your organization’s “cognitive surplus”), “big data” (how to process and extract value out of the enormous amount of enterprise information) and cloud (moving toward a standard cloud service offering). Gartner commented that the trend of personalized cloud services tailored to clients’ needs will evolve over the next 18 months into basic, standard cloud service offerings. From the client’s standpoint, this will certainly help them with apples-to-apples comparisons.

As I was listening to this commentary, I thought about the U.S. General Services Administration’s Infrastructure as a Service BPA, in which CGI is one of just a dozen cloud companies on the contract vehicle. Here is an example of how the U.S. federal government is working—both through the GSA’s efforts and the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP)—to harmonize federal cloud computing standards and procedures. It will be interesting to see how other governments and the private sector follow and evolve this model in the months to come.

Yet, it’s not surprising perhaps, that there continues to be uncertainty about the cloud. There is still a lot of misconceptions about where and how data is managed. In listening to various sessions, I noticed that software vendors are more than happy to perpetuate the security fear. When executives came to speak with us about CGI’s cloud service, we spoke a lot about our cloud security approach, which includes continuous monitoring, reporting and improvement. Certainly it is a prerequisite for these executives to look for a cloud vendor with a real-time security mindset and a track record of performance. Once we got past those misconceptions, conversations turned toward the opportunities to achieve needed outcomes possible through SaaS and virtual desktop environments, for instance. By not having to focus on the underlying infrastructure, there is a lot of opportunity to innovate on fewer resources than previously required.

It was really pleasure to spend a few days talking about the state and future of IT. If you want to chat about this, please don’t hesitate to contact me. It would be a pleasure to keep the conversation going.