IT seeks a safe road to the cloud

The road map for expanding enterprise use of cloud computing is being drawn by IT executives like Mark Stone, CIO at Safety-Kleen Systems Inc.

Safety-Kleen, an environmental services company with about 4,200 employees, has turned to cloud technology to run 15 per cent of its applications, mostly for functions like CRM and travel management, Stone said. About 35 per cent of the company's application portfolio, including its general ledger systems, could be hosted externally within three years, he added.

"I can go to a variety of [software-as-a-service] providers and put in software that's every bit as functionally rich as anything I've developed on-site," without having to worry about the upkeep of an IT infrastructure, Stone said at Computerworld's Storage Networking World conference earlier this month in Grapevine, Texas.

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