Unlike most other companies, however, EMC is a technology company, owner of the dominant vitualisation provider, and embarked on its journey -- in 2004 -- long before the term 'Cloud' became ubiquitous. "

The timing means it has already completed the first two phases of the migrating to the cloud. The first phase, IT production, involved consolidating and virtualising IT infrastructure and optimising the data centre. The second phase, 'business production', aims to deliver application services from a virtualised infrastructure. The company is now well into phase three: IT-as-a-service.

The phases had their technical challenges, such as security, server consolidation ratios and monitoring and logging virtual applications and infrastructure. But CIO, Sanjay Mirchandani, says fellow chief information officers in the midst of their own journeys must look to the weakest link -- people -- to avoid the biggest challenges.

For one, and as the analyst and strategy firm, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), notes in its examination of EMC's cloud move, it is easier to change technology than behaviour. While CIOs may implement a new technology and change the way IT infrastructure is deployed fairly quickly, they must also understand the impact on the organisation and the transformation that will ensue.

"Fundamentally, I spend a lot of time with my leadership team on the fact the [infrastructure-as-a-service] phase is causing us to run, govern and consume technology differently," Mirchandani says. "In some cases, it is an evolution and in others you have to make it a revolution, because if you try to force virtulisation and highly virtualised infrastructure into the classic ways of managing IT, you've lost the plot." Mirchandani says that with advanced stages of virtualisation and the Cloud, CIOs must manage a cultural change which moves IT staff beyond roles and into competencies.