Today we are featuring a guest blog post from Tony Scott, our CIO at Microsoft. Tony will be sharing his perspective of how the cloud is changing the enterprise landscape and the role of the CIO.

One of the big challenges CIOs face is the increasing cost and complexity of IT infrastructure. As the needs of the enterprise have evolved, we have, over time, added a Band-Aid here, some glue over there and a little baling wire in that corner. All this to quickly meet the demands associated with evolving business needs. These demands have, however, added complexity to the infrastructures we manage.

To make the situation even more challenging, the work environment itself has changed.  No longer do our employees work from one, centralized location. Today, offices are often located around the world, and employees across different cultures work in different time zones in many different places ranging from their home to an airport. And it’s only going to get more intense as companies continue to build a greater presence in emerging markets.

The cloud has tremendous potential to help CIOs address these challenges. As organizations move their messaging and collaboration workloads into the cloud, CIOs will have the opportunity to reduce the cost and complexity of managing their infrastructures, freeing up their time to focus on more strategic organizational imperatives.

As you explore cloud solutions, here are three pieces of advice that I have found helpful:

1. It is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Start slow – move your email, messaging or collaboration tools to the cloud. Perhaps you move remote workers to the cloud before employees at headquarters. Find the approach that best fits your business.
2. Security-security-security.  Make sure you are confident that your cloud provider has secure, redundant data centers. Learn the details of their security protocols for both their hardware and change management processes. Customers have told me that they could never afford implementing the level of security that is present in Microsoft’s cloud data centers. I think that is key – if you can’t replicate the level of security that your cloud provider offers in your own datacenter, then your security concerns should be mitigated.
3. Assess the business value that moving to the cloud gives your organization. It should save money and benefit the productivity of IT and end users. It should also allow you and your staff to work more on strategic projects.

The role of the CIO will continue to evolve as cloud computing matures.  Traditionally, CIOs have been the gatekeepers of important information and of people’s privacy. As the work environment has changed, information sharing and access has become increasingly important. Employees need access to information 24/7, wherever they are. I am finding that with the cloud, I have a new set of tools at my