Many of the IT departments nowadays are busy fitting their existing IT into the cloud world or vice versa, and occupying themselves with cost evaluation, infrastructure alignment, vendor identification, skill acquisition, automation design, etc. Beyond the infrastructure, most of the existing mission-critical enterprise IT applications are far from being optimized for cloud computing either. Therefore many commercial opportunities exist today in both cloud and Big Data space to help companies’ IT departments get into the buzz. The complexities and efforts involved can hardly be overestimated, yet the direction can be even fuzzier.

Let’s first ask what would be the future picture of the Consumer IT space? With the coming of the Internet of Things (IoT) and many futurist movies, it is not hard to imagine that plug-and-play, simplicity, connectivity and speed, anywhere and anytime, will be in the future of Consumer space. Privacy and security concerns will more or less be delegated to the enterprise service providers and network providers in the ecosystem.

But for Enterprise IT, the future picture is likely going to be more complex. One thing is certain: the future of the enterprise IT departments will need handle a lot of more than the current demands to support enterprise operations. The increasing business and market trends to offer intelligence services by collecting, consuming, processing more and more market and consumer data, of their own or from others, connecting and transferring between more and more systems, will be in the future scope for enterprises. With cloud compute, storage, network technologies far from maturity today, existing enterprise applications mostly out-of-date in the cloud world, standards and regulations are still in the making, the fast-changing and foggy future demands from consumers and IoT to Enterprise IT are just adding more fuels to the fire. It’s too early to assume that incremental changes and upgrades here and there, which have been the norm for large enterprise IT departments for decades, can sufficiently and effectively transform current IT systems and applications safely into the future when the new setting is needed.

However, if an enterprise still has the confidence to move into the future of the next decade or further, have they thought about starting right now to directly invest on a new and flexible IT picture of the future by designing entirely new multi-cloud, Big-Data-capable infrastructure and application architectures from the scratch instead of focusing on tweaking the existing? This approach can be started today with much agility and speed than on incremental changes to make the existing fit. Although many technology details are not completely ready today, the ecosystem, the connectivity and plumbing concepts are already here and many innovations have already started. All the needed technologies and affordable choices will only become more readily available in the days (not years) to come. The justification of the different approaches will involve the time and cost evaluation, but that depends how an enterprise view the market, the future and the existing and new business challenges and opportunities. This will like become an interesting case study in the business schools on “marginal cost” vs. “total cost”. It could be quite counter-intuitive for the decision-makers. What could be viewed as an easier or more obvious choice today by selecting smaller “marginal cost on investment” based on the existing, could end up becoming a much more expensive “total cost on opportunity” of the near future.