The role of the CIO is to run the high level vision of an IT Organization such that it properly maps to all other goals and objectives of the business. The clo

The role of the CIO is to run the high level vision of an IT Organization such that it properly maps to all other goals and objectives of the business. The cloud is just a tool - and any CIO worth their salt will see the cloud for what it is and has been for years; managed services. The issues are that any CIO that starts dropping the word cloud too often probably is too abstracted from the technologies and stacks that enable the cloud. They are no different than what you have internally - and you have to really understand the pros and cons of cloud deployment as it specifically pertains to your business. The cloud is fantastic for any service that needs to be abstracted from the tactical infrastructure deployments of hardware so they can focus on their core service (Netflix being the most beautiful example of this) But where does the cloud not make sense? Internal traditional IT services that are never going away: Active directory, file, print, security, etc.. So - does the cloud change the role of the CIO - no not at all. What it does do it start to change the technology choices that the CIO has to pick from, understand and evaluate. Managed services (ASP/Saas/PaaS/Iaas/ETC) make sense when you want to leverage the infrastructure expertise of a provider and your mission is to deliver content or an application. You could still utilize the cloud for large scale apps like ERP, EHR and even file storage (dropbox enterprise better come soon or I'll have to go knock on Drews door) -- but putting large scale, mission critical apps in the cloud introduces a layer of points-of-failure that many enterprises are not yet comfortable with. So, to mitigate the risks of relying on cloud services, an organization - a CIO in specific, better make sure he has a top network architect advising on multiple carrier, divergent pathing to the internet to ensure that you eliminate premise inet failures as a POF to your service. Finally - the idea behind an enterprise (traditional enterprise) leveraging cloud services is to (ideally) use the cloud as a elastic capacity rather than sole source. The starting question in the eval should be: WTF do we do when AWS goes down? If your first question about any service is not "WTF do we do about downtime" -- then you shouldn't be a CIO.