The challenges of IT may have come full circle. In the early days of corporate computing, a key enterprise IT frustration was catering for disparate systems – PC, mainframe, minicomputer, LAN – using different standards and different platforms, none of them speaking to each other and each living in their own little islands of information. Despite the increasing ubiquity of cloud computing, today’s CIOs face an uphill struggle in unifying the huge variety of cloud platforms, APIs, solutions and products erupting across their organisations.

Many companies are using cloud in one form or another. Mervyn Govender, CIO of Dev-X, says his firm uses Amazon Web Services for its web back-end because it was scalable. “For what we needed when we started two years ago, they were the only guys around.” David Motlafi, chief director for programming and applications at the Gauteng Department of Finance, has all the province’s e-mail in the cloud.